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A former IRS consultant was sentenced to five years in prison on Monday for leaking tax information about “thousands of the nation’s wealthiest individuals” to news outlets between 2018 and 2020. Charles Littlejohn, 38, pleaded guilty in October to one count of unauthorized disclosure of tax return and return information after reaching a plea agreement with government prosecutors. The Justice Department did not name the news outlets or individuals whose tax information was disclosed, though the description and timeline of Littlejohn’s actions coincided with reporting in The New York Times and ProPublica about former President Trump’s tax returns. In his...

The IRS whistleblower who alleges there has been political interference in the Justice Department's investigation of Hunter Biden will testify to the House Ways and Means Committee behind closed doors on Friday, Just the News has learned. Supervisory Criminal Investigative Agent Gary Shapley will be allowed to talk about the specifics of what has happened in the five-year long investigation of the first son. Before Wednesday, Shapley's name had been protected as part of his whistleblower complaint, but multiple sources confirmed his identity to Just the News and said the agent was planning to do a brief interview with a...

ZURICH (Reuters) - A potential lurch to the left in Germany's election on Sunday is scaring millionaires into moving assets into Switzerland, bankers and tax lawyers say. If the centre-left Social Democrats (SPD), hard-left Linke and environmentalist Greens come to power, the reintroduction of a wealth tax and a tightening of inheritance tax could be on the political agenda. "For the super-rich, this is red hot," said a German-based tax lawyer with extensive Swiss operations. "Entrepreneurial families are highly alarmed." The move shows how many rich people still see Switzerland as an attractive place to park wealth, despite its efforts...

A high-level U.N. panel .. made a series of sweeping recommendations aimed at reforming the global financial system, which includes the implementation of an international corporate tax rate. The High-Level Panel for International Financial Accountability, Transparency and Integrity for Achieving the 2030 Agenda (FACTI) said a 20% to 30% global corporate tax on profits would “help limit incentives against profit shifting, tax competition and a race to the bottom.” The panel recommends the creation of a body that collects and disseminates data about corporate profits, where the assets of multinational corporations are located, as well as which entities own them,...

Washington is a cesspool of waste, fraud, and abuse. All taxpayers, to avoid having their income squandered in D.C., should go above and beyond the call of duty to minimize the amount they send to the IRS. Which is why today’s column is a bipartisan love fest for Donald Trump and Joe Biden – both of whom have been very aggressive in limiting their tax liabilities. Here are some details from the report in the New York Times about Trump’s leaked tax returns. Donald J. Trump paid $750 in federal income taxes the year he won the presidency. In his...

EBay Inc., the online auction company with 180 million buyers around the world, earned $34 million of profit in Florida in 2014, according to state auditors. At Florida’s official corporate income tax rate of 5.5 percent, eBay should have paid more than $1.8 million in state taxes -- enough money to hire 40 new teachers. But records show eBay actually paid $18,810 -- not even enough to hire one. It’s not an isolated example. Auditors say Sanofi Pasteur Inc., one of the world’s largest vaccine manufacturers, earned an estimated $55 million of profits in Florida between 2008 and 2013 --...

Apple has been named as the biggest corporate tax avoider in the United States after booking $218.55 billion (£171.6 billion) of profit offshore last year. The tech giant was able to save $65.08 billion (£51.1 billion) that it should have paid in tax thanks to its convoluted arrangements. The report revealed that last year three quarters of the Fortune 500 companies use subsidiaries in offshore tax havens where they sent a total of $2.42 trillion (£1.9 trillion) of income. In the US alone this amounted to $715.62 billion (£561.9 billion) in tax which they avoided paying. The report of said...

U2 front man Bono came under fire today from campaigners who claim he his not putting his money where his mouth is. The human rights activist was accused of robbing the world's poorest people by storing some of his wealth in a tax haven. Bono impersonator Paul O'Toole joined protesters outside the Irish Department of Finance on the eve of the launch of the band's new album No Line On The Horizon in the Irish Republic. Campaign group the Debt and Development Coalition Ireland (DDCI) claimed the supergroup was depriving the Irish exchequer of much-needed revenue which could be spent...

The German government on Monday said it hoped the revelations from the so-called “Panama Papers” will spur global efforts to combat tax evasion and money laundering. “We hope the current debate will turn up the heat,” finance ministry spokesman Martin Jäger told a news briefing. […] The Panama Papers are a massive leak of 11.5 million documents allegedly exposing the secret offshore dealings of a host of world leaders, celebrities and sports stars, implicating figures from Russian President Vladimir Putin to Barcelona striker Lionel Messi. […] The documents, from around 214,000 offshore entities covering almost 40 years, came from Mossack...

... Bokas also does installation and repair jobs — and half of those involve cash deals with no receipts for his labor. The result is that a job costing 250 euros ($275) goes for 125 euros because he doesn’t charge the client sales tax and Bokas doesn’t report the income for taxation. “I’ve got a receipt for everything I sell in my shop,” Bokas said. But tax officials “don’t know what my hands do.”

A British parliamentary committee on Friday accused the accounting firm PwC of promoting tax avoidance on an industrial scale and urged the government to step in and do more to regulate the tax industry. The Public Accounts Committee issued a scathing report, accusing PwC of mass-marketing tax avoidance plans and diverting profits to Luxembourg through intra-company loans. “We believe that PwC's activities represent nothing short of the promotion of tax avoidance on an industrial scale,” committee chair Margaret Hodge said. “The effect has been to reduce the amount of corporation tax that some multinational companies pay in the countries in...

The finance ministers of Germany, France and Italy have called on the EU to propose new law to curb corporate tax avoidance.In a joint letter to the EU’s economics commissioner Pierre Moscovici on Monday (1 December), Germany’s Wolfgang Schäuble, France’s Michel Sapin and Pier-Carlo Padoan from Italy said that a new EU directive on anti-base erosion and profit-sharing could be presented before the end of 2014. […] The letter is not the first time that the eurozone’s three largest countries have presented a united front on tax. They are also among the eleven countries who have promised to introduce a...

Suffering from a clear lack of intellectual honesty, the morally bankrupt progressive socialist mayor of New York City seems to have a knack for tax avoidance. (And remember: despite what Harry Reid would have you believe, tax avoidance is not a crime.) According to public records, Bill “punish the rich” de Blasio paid a mere 8 percent of his income in federal taxes. Just to put that in context for any liberal that has accidently stumbled across this paragraph: That’s less than that capitalist pig, Mitt Romney paid in prior years. Of course, to be fair, it is possible...

European Union nations on Thursday agreed on a sweeping policy to fight tax evasion after tiny Luxembourg dropped its reservations to new rules which render its secretive banking culture more transparent. Luxembourg Prime Minister Xavier Bettel confirmed at Thursday’s summit of EU leaders “the willingness of the government to take that road,” a key step to scrap the banking secrecy for foreigners. […] The legislation proposes an EU-wide automatic exchange of data on bank deposits to allow governments to identify and pursue tax evaders with foreign accounts on home soil. Van Rompuy said it would “close down loopholes, promote automatic...

Federal tax expert Gene Steuerle said at a discussion on low-wage workers on Tuesday at the Capitol that government social welfare programs penalize low-income people for being married. “Staying unmarried is the tax shelter for the poor,” Steuerle, a fellow at the Urban Institute and former deputy assistant secretary of the Treasury for tax analysis in the Ronald Reagan administration, said at an event to release a survey commissioned by Oxfam America on low-wage workers in the United States. …

An Italian court Wednesday sentenced fashion house duo Dolce & Gabbana to one year and eight months in prison for tax evasion of around €1 billion ($1.33 billion), according to media reports. Lawyers for Dolce and Gabbana, whose celebrity clients include Beyoncé and Madonna, immediately said they will be appealing, and under Italian law the sentence will be suspended in the meantime. Domenico Dolce and Stefano Gabbana were accused of having transferred control of their brands to a shell company in Luxembourg in 2004 and 2005 to avoid paying Italian taxes. …

Politicians are having fun slapping around big corporations for supposedly not paying enough taxes. In this country, Apple is the current target, while in Europe it’s Google, Amazon, and Starbucks, according to the Washington Post today. But there is an elephant in the room that the many reporters and politicians blustering over the issue have been too ideologically blind to see: There is no obvious harm being done by today’s corporate tax avoidance. The first thing to note is that when investment flows through tax havens, it’s not clear that it causes any economic distortions. The Washington Post story...

  The European Parliament met Tuesday to discuss the issue of tax evasion throughout the UK and the Eurozone, and how the European Parliament might clamp down on those attempting to protect their well earned wealth from government confiscation.    All was going according to plan, until UKIP member Nigel Farage was given the floor.    Farage immediately launched into a classic rant against Barroso and the rest of the EU bureaucrats, stating that it is not the average man on the street that is engaging in tax fraud, but the European Parliament members themselves:    If we look at the...

The European Union’s leaders have agreed to push through a major policy to tackle tax evasion by the end of the year. The EU said the 27 heads of state and governments agreed at summit in Brussels Wednesday to an automatic exchange of bank information among the bloc’s tax authorities to catch tax cheats. … European Union leaders on Wednesday sought to advance their fight against tax fraud and close the loopholes for large corporations’ tax avoidance schemes. … According to a draft summit conclusion obtained by The Associated Press, the leaders are urging rapid progress in the “efforts taken...

The Internal Revenue Service is collecting a lot more than taxes this year--it's also acquiring a huge volume of personal information on taxpayers' digital activities, from eBay auctions to Facebook posts and, for the first time ever, credit card and e-payment transaction records, as it expands its search for tax cheats to places it's never gone before.