Why blowing the whistle on corporate tax fraud is critical to boost our economic recovery

The U.S. economy is slowly pulling up from the system shock it took in 2008 around the mortgage backed securities and real estate scandal. The avarice which was at the basis of that disaster is not dissimilar from the corporate greed seen in what is known as transfer pricing or offshore tax havens. In transfer pricing, companies say on paper how their products are produced in the US and elsewhere and then shift the major tax burden to the country with the lowest corporate taxes–Ireland and Switzerland. Some of the tax loopholes are legal and must be closed but an awful lot of what is going on is rabid tax evasion and clearly in violation of law. Here, the IRS really needs the insider whistleblowers to know how the schemes are set up and where to find the evidence. The reason is that even when companies are public, the flow of cash is very difficult to trace. Why should people come forward to reveal the wrongdoing? Well one reason is that when tax evasion happens, the rest of us bear the burden as we must sustain the economy with fewer dollars. Another reason has to do with national loyalty. If a company develops and earns significant sums of moneys here, it should be willing to pay its fair share of taxes and not to seek to evade them. As we pull up from near disaster, let’s not allow our massive companies to earn the highest yields in decades and pay the lowest corporate taxes in 16 years. If you know of tax fraud, come forward and reveal it. The IRS whistleblower program allows you to render the information anonymously. Jeffrey Newman represents whistleblowers.