Someone with Batman's resources could surely find some accommodating tax shelters abroad.
Congress's Joint Committee on Taxation estimates that fully taxing the profits sheltered abroad by American corporations would raise an additional $42 billion in revenue this year, enough to end more than half the spending cuts in the sequester.
And so, analysts say, companies looking for shelter abroad this year will have to look to China, Asia's second-largest market for technology products after Japan and its fastest-growing one.
As long as there is political chaos in North and Central Africa and the Middle East, people will flee their homes to find shelter abroad and Europe will remain a destination.
Taxing repatriated income isn't a matter of companies being taxed twice on profits they made abroad, it's a matter of them being taxed at all on things like revenue from patents and trademarks they have sheltered abroad.
In the meantime, however, there are many steps Congress can take to curb tax avoidance, like ending procedures that allow companies to easily shelter profits abroad.
NEW CORPORATE TAX SHELTER: MERGER ABROAD | American corporations increasingly are reducing their tax bill by buying a foreign company and effectively renouncing their United States citizenship, DealBook's David Gelles reports.
A glance at one site, offshoreprofit.com, operated from Venezuela by an individual indentified as Lord Antonio D. Gonzalez, suggests how easy it is for just about anyone to shelter money abroad.
DealBook » New Corporate Tax Shelter: A Merger Abroad | More corporations are reducing their tax bill by buying a foreign company and reincorporating elsewhere.
The proposal, part of an important global trade bill, would give the prodigals a special 5.25percenttaxax rate on an estimated $400 billion in profits now sitting overseas because of a law that shelters money earned abroad if it stays abroad.
