WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Tax experts for global corporations are hot on the trail of loopholes in the sweeping tax law approved in December by President Donald Trump and Republicans in the U.S. Congress.
Barely five months since it took effect, the law is already yielding potential tax-dodge gimmicks, from revising cross-border payments to substituting bank loans for internal debt.
These fast-emerging strategies are designed mainly to blunt the impact of three new corporate taxes imposed by the law, said lawyers and consultants who help large, international companies minimize their taxes while staying within the letter of the law.
Detailed guidance on the three taxes, which are extremely complex, is still pending from the Treasury Department and the U.S. Internal Revenue Service. As a result, actual deployment of the new strategies by multinational corporations is still likely months off.
But discussions about ambiguities in the Republican legislation and how to exploit them is well under way in the tax planning industry, with the IRS and Treasury looking on warily.
At a recent Washington conference, panelists from the law firm of Caplin & Drysdale, audit and consulting giant PricewaterhouseCoopers and the IRS talked about the new law’s Base Erosion and Anti-Abuse Tax (BEAT) and how it interacts with a standard business accounting entry called cost of goods sold (COGS) that encompasses the expenses of producing goods.
Cost of goods sold normally covers raw material and labor expenses, but also other, less clear-cut expenses. Importantly for tax planners, COGS is exempt from BEAT, under the new tax law. So putting more expenses into COGS could reduce BEAT exposure.
“There are a lot of different
