Thread by @DawsonSField

I guess for April Fools Day the @nytimes will publish a real news story today!

IRS caught Big Pharma company Bristol Myers dodging $1.4B by assigning patents to it's Ireland office. A common tactic to pay royalties on it's products into a low tax nation. #ButNothingsHappening

https://twitter.com/JesseDrucker/status/1377606318639480832

Multinational corporations buy off Swamp creatures around the world to make loopholes that they can drive billions in profits through to evade taxes.
Relying upon the corruption services industry (accountants, lawyers, & others) to hide the arrangements & defend them if caught.

Ah, now we see why the NY Times cares today. It wants to use it as an excuse to support the infrastructure tax increases. Of course these multinationals will just invent new tax avoidance schemes & small businesses will pay all the taxes just as it is not.

Bristol Myers had been forced to fire PriceWaterhouseCoopers accounting firm when they got caught in an accounting scandal in 2006.

But when they needed to evade taxes in 2012, they went back to the firm they knew could do more shady accounting for them to evade taxes.

So PwC helped Bristol Myers play shell games with their patents to illegally generate more tax deductions. But you can claim it isn't a crime if a Swampy law firm signs off on it saying it is legal!

It worked Bristol Myers reduced it's tax rate from 25% to -7% with this evasion scheme!

Even their investors knew this was a shady deal resulting in a 'unique' tax rate & had questions the executives would not answer.

In 2020, the IRS ruled that Bristol Myers was evading taxes & drafted a legal analysis to support it. The company was redacted but done in a way that allowed sleuths to see what was behind the redactions.

Was it simply government incompetence as redacting private tax payer information?

Or did someone want this accounting & legal rubber stamped corruption exposed to the public to keep it from being buried?

IRS found that both the law firm & the accounting firm ignored the one law Bristol Myers was breaking in their legal analysis ruling the plan legal.

It is not an unusual tactic in the Swamp to get a lawyer's rubber stamp ignoring the real crime & declaring your actions legal...

Let's hope the IRS grows a backbone now that this has leaked & doesn't give Bristol Myers a sweetheart deal to pay back only a portion of the taxes it evaded. I think some corruption services industry leaders need to face consequences for engineering this too!