Multinationals must pay taxes to boost U.S. competitiveness

Most American businesses know the drill: At the end of the quarter or year, they calculate how much money they made, what legal deductions they can claim and how much they will ultimately owe the federal government in taxes. They write up a check and send it in to the Internal Revenue Service. No business likes doing it, but it’s a cost we all have to bear.

Unless, that is, you are associated with one of the U.S. multinational corporations that have stashed $2.1 trillion in profit overseas. Under the U.S. deferral rule, they don’t have to pay taxes on that profit until they bring it back home, so they don’t. In fact, they’d rather never pay taxes on it.

If they paid even a modest federal tax on their offshore profit, they’d pony up more than half a trillion dollars in federal tax revenue at a time when the economy continues to struggle and Congress approaches each budget and debt-limit vote under a seeming threat of a government shutdown.

Instead, U.S. multinationals want Congress to change the law so they never have to pay taxes on those offshore profits. For one, Apple CEO Tim Cook recently called for an end to the taxation of offshore profits, a practice that he calls “archaic” and bad for the U.S. economy.

As CEO of a software company, I understand the drive to keep costs low, but many of our multinationals pay little or no federal taxes. That reduces the funds needed to pay for the education, research and infrastructure that are critical to the competitiveness of U.S. businesses.

Multinationals compound the problem by artificially shifting profit offshore, much of it to tax havens. In fact, 72 percent of our Fortune 500 companies used tax-haven subsidiaries in 2014 and the 30 companies with the most profit offshore used 1,200 of them. By one estimate, the corporate off-shoring of profit costs U.S. taxpayers $90 billion a year.

Our multinationals want the United States to take up a territorial tax system, where offshore profits are never taxed. That’s a bad idea. The U.S. deferral rule already favors multinationals over smaller domestic businesses like mine. Territorial taxation would make that worse. That’s probably why, according to polling by the American Sustainable Business Council, more than four out of five small business owners oppose a territorial tax system.

My business, Rhiza Inc., produces software used by large and small businesses all over the world. We proudly compete against some of the world’s largest companies. Our company’s technology has been built on the shoulders of prior public investments in networking, development of computers and the Internet itself.

We couldn’t have done that without the publicly funded schools and universities that prepare my employees for work in the fast-changing world of software development. The competitiveness of our businesses requires us to raise the skills of our workforce and that’s never certain.

In fact, U.S. student math-achievement test scores fell this year, with 67 percent of eighth-graders and 60 percent of fourth-graders testing as “not proficient” in math.

That’s the first decline since 1990, when the National Assessment of Educational Progress tests began.

We need to spend more revenue on our skills, our research and our infrastructure, not less. Our businesses depend on it, our economy depends on it and the American people depend on it. Plus, we can do this without raising taxes. We just need our multinationals to pay their fair share. Like the rest of us, they depend on our schools to educate their workers, our courts to protect their rights and our roads to get their products to market.

As to a territorial tax system, it’s a bad idea. When Congress does reform the tax code, the reform should be comprehensive. It should support all businesses, not just multinationals. It should result in a simpler, better-coordinated tax code. It should support pass-through entity purposes for small businesses taxes, since so many businesses are pass-through.

Plus, as much as possible, tax reform should encourage domestic investment and job creation.