We've previously written about how corporations are angling for a
tax repatriation holiday, in which corporations would get to bring money they're currently holding overseas into the U.S. at a sharply reduced tax rate (and how some Democrats, like
Chuck Schumer, are supportive of the idea). To recap, a tax repatriation holiday is a bad idea, one that would increase deficits by tens of billions of dollars and send a message to corporations that they should just keep money offshore as a matter of routine, because it won't be long before they get another "holiday." And a 2004 repatriation holiday didn't lead to job growth, either.
Then there's this: A Washington Post article by Jia Lynn Yang points out that many of the corporations lobbying for a tax repatriation holiday are not only moving jobs overseas, they're hiding the exact numbers of people they employ here and abroad from the public, reporting them to the government only when required to do so and on the condition that only aggregate, not firm-specific, numbers are reported.
As a result, we know that "The latest data show that multinationals cut 2.9 million jobs in the United States and added 2.4 million overseas between 2000 and 2009," but we don't know which companies cut how many jobs. That means that when we're told corporations deserve a tax break because they're job creators, we don't actually know if that's true:
But experts say that without details on which companies are contributing to job growth and which are not, policymakers risk flying blind as they try to jump-start the hiring of American workers.
"It’s an important piece of information that the American people should have," said Ron Hira, an associate professor of public policy at the Rochester Institute of Technology. "Should you listen to the kind of advice these companies have about how to grow the economy when their record and their model indicates they’ve cut jobs? . . . Or should we talk to people who actually do create jobs in the United States?"
Despite the bewilderment of a U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis researcher quoted saying, "I don’t think they really have anything to hide, but I don’t really know the logic of why that’s something they don’t just put in their annual report," corporations do in fact work hard to hide their outsourcing activities, as we found in Outsourced, a report I helped compile while working for Working America:
"US corporations that use offshore service providers often prefer to keep it quiet," confirms the Plunkett industry almanac. Corporate policy has shifted to obscure the dimensions of offshoring whenever possible. Internal documents from IBM, for example, indicate that the company was very aware of the sensitive nature of its investment decisions. One memorandum advised managers to "not be transparent regarding the purpose/intent" of plans to eliminate jobs and to never use terms such as "onshore" and "offshore."
To recap: Corporations that don't allow public disclosure of how many jobs they cut in the U.S. and add overseas—let alone how many they directly shift out of the U.S.—and that are keeping large piles of money overseas to avoid paying taxes here are now arguing that if the government will just give them a giant tax break, they'll move the money here. We're supposed to believe that this will create jobs, except that most of these corporations are already sitting on large piles of cash here in the United States without doing much to create jobs and there's no reason to believe that a tax repatriation holiday will do anything to change that dynamic. What's worse, many in Congress do appear to have bought into this obvious fiction.