Apple made an aggressive pitch for a corporate tax holiday Monday, stressing that it plans to keep more than $60 billion parked offshore until Congress makes it easier for companies to bring those profits home.

The warning from the nation’s most valuable company came as Apple announced it would pay a dividend to shareholders and buy back stock, moves that will cost about $45 billion over three years.

But Apple — which, like several other Silicon Valley titans, has spent months lobbying for more flexibility to repatriate offshore profits — said it will rely exclusively on domestic cash reserves for the transactions and will not touch the billions in profits held abroad.

“Repatriating the cash from offshore would result in significant tax consequences under current U.S. law,” Apple Chief Financial Officer Peter Oppenheimer said on a conference call.

Apple and other backers of a repatriation holiday — including Oracle, Cisco, Microsoft and Google — threw their support last year behind the WIN America Campaign, a lobbying coalition that urged Congress to temporarily reduce the tax rate that U.S. multinationals have to pay on offshore profits.

Read the article

Debt Free America Act – States as purposes of this Act the raising of sufficient revenue from a fee on transactions to eliminate the national debt within seven years and the phasing out of the individual income tax.

• Amends the Internal Revenue Code to impose a 1% fee, offset by a corresponding nonrefundable income tax credit, on transactions that use a payment instrument, including any check, cash, credit card, transfer of stock, bonds, or other financial instrument, the only exception being transactions involving the purchase or sale of stock. Defines “transaction” to include retail and wholesale sales, purchases of intermediate goods, and financial and intangible transactions.
• Establishes in the legislative branch the Bipartisan Task Force for Responsible Fiscal Action to review the fiscal imbalance of the federal government and make recommendations to improve such imbalance. Provides for expedited consideration by Congress of Task Force recommendations.
• Repeals after 2017 the individual income tax, refundable and nonrefundable personal tax credits, and the alternative minimum tax (AMT) on individuals.
• Directs the Secretary of the Treasury to: (1) prioritize the repayment of the national debt to protect the fiscal stability of the United States; and (2) study and report to Congress on the implementation of this Act.

Theoretically, everyone would pay one cent on the dollar for every such transaction in America every day — whether $3 million on a $300 million business acquisition, $300 on the purchase of a $30,000 car, or $5 on a $500 ATM withdrawal.

To reduce the impact of such a flat tax on the poor, Fattah’s bill provides for a 1 percent tax credit for couples earning $250,000 or less ($125,000 or less for individuals) and discretion by the Treasury Department to exempt certain transactions on which lower-income people disproportionately rely. Another idea would be to amend his bill to exempt all transactions below $500.

Using 2008 numbers as an example: There was $755 trillion in total transactions that year. If you deduct the exempted $312 million in stock transactions, that leaves $443 trillion as the tax base, minus the cost of the tax credit and other possible measures to soften the impact on the poor.

The government sent out more than $1 billion in fraudulent refunds last year

WASHINGTON — The government sent out more than $1 billion in fraudulent refunds last year and offered this explanation Thursday for the bad checks in the mail: The Internal Revenue Service has too few resources to pursue every tax fraud case.

IRS investigators never even looked at an estimated $742 million in fraudulent refunds, according to a report by the Treasury Department office that monitors the agency. When they did identify an additional $264 million in bad refunds, it was too late to stop them from being issued.

The report noted that the IRS must divide its limited resources among numerous areas of compliance. “However, this is a significant revenue loss to the federal government and that must be addressed,” said J. Russell George, the Treasury’s inspector general for tax administration.

The number of improper refunds filed appears to be growing rapidly, the report said. “The problem is becoming unmanageable, and the IRS cannot afford to continue handling it in the same manner as in the past,” according to the report. It urged the tax agency to make the refund screening program — known as the Questionable Refund Program — a priority.

The IRS has estimated that the tax gap — the difference between taxes owed and taxes actually paid — at about $290 billion a year. Of that, about 57 percent comes from individuals understating incomes or overstating deductions and exemptions.

IRS spokesman Terry Lemons said the agency has made significant improvements over the past two years. “We stop the vast majority of fraudulent refunds and we prosecute people who try to cheat the system,” Lemons said.

George’s report recommended the IRS divert resources to go after such fraud cases. But Lemons said that could hurt other operations and mean fewer dollars from enforcement activities.

Lemons said the agency issued more than $470 billion in refunds in 2006 and 2007.

The report said the IRS fraud detection centers stopped more than $1.2 billion in fraudulent refunds in 2007, compared with $412 million in 2005, the last year the detection system fully functioned.

Because the system picks up only those refunds with higher dollar values, about 500,000 potentially fraudulent refunds did not enter the centers’ screening process. Had those refunds been included, the centers would have identified an additional $742 million in fraud, the report estimated.

In 2006, because of a technical problem in the fraud detection system, the IRS succeeded in identifying and stopping only $189 million in fraudulent refunds while paying out an estimated $894 million, the report said.

The Treasury’s inspector general, in a separate report Thursday, lauded the IRS for what it said was a “generally successful” 2008 filing season during which returns and refunds were processed in a timely fashion.

This report said the IRS did a good job in overcoming several obstacles, including changes involving the alternative minimum tax. The agency was also responsible for sending out checks to more than 130 million people as part of the economic aid plan signed into law in February.