‘Frontline' expert takes on corporate tax shelters (2/19 broadcast)

[papau]

‘Frontline' expert takes on corporate tax shelters

By AARON BARNHART
The Kansas City Star


Frontline
Hedrick Smith put on a protective suit and boots before examining the sewers in Bochum, Germany, as part of the latest "Frontline" report.

“A lot of people in media think that you can't do financial stories on television because they're too difficult to understand,” Hedrick Smith says. “I just don't believe that.”

The Pulitzer- and Emmy-winning reporter knows of what he speaks. For years Smith has been breaking arcane business concepts into bite-sized pieces for the viewers of PBS' “Frontline” series.

On Thursday he strikes again with “Tax Me If You Can,” an investigative report into the highly complicated system of corporate tax shelters. It airs at 9 p.m. on KCPT and KTWU.<snip>


http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/tax/

The tax shelter was one of corporate America's biggest hidden profit centers in recent years. Shelters have become so lucrative that some experts estimate as much as $50 billion is lost to the U.S. Treasury each year. And ordinary taxpayers wind up footing the bill. FRONTLINE correspondent Hedrick Smith provides an inside look at how big corporations and wealthy individuals cut their taxes with intricate, hidden, and abusive tax shelters and investigates the role of blue chip accounting firms in these secret deals.

Following the broadcast, visit FRONTLINE's Web site for more on this report, including:

· Frequently Asked Questions about the abuse of tax shelters and what the U.S. government should do to attack the problem;

· The debate over corporate taxes and the taxing of capital;

· Experts' views on how best to deter bogus tax shelters -- piecemeal measures or sweeping reforms;

· A closer look at how grassroots citizen action in Germany halted some of the bogus transactions by U.S. firms;

· Plus, extended interviews and streaming video of the full program.

http://finance.pro2net.com/x42526.xml

Tax Me If You Can: PBS Special Feb. 19 Investigates Tax Shelter Abuse
Accounting firms, legal firms and bankers put in the hot seat
BOSTON, Mass., Feb. 17, 2004 (Market Wire) — It was one of corporate America's biggest hidden profit centers in the past decade -- the tax shelter -- and it became so lucrative that last year it helped major U.S. companies cut their tax rate to just half of what they had historically paid, leaving individual taxpayers to make up the difference.

The General Accounting Office estimates that illegitimate tax shelters cost the government more than $85 billion in recent years.
"Anything that's not being paid that should be paid, that's basically what the honest taxpayer is making up," asserts Charles Rossotti, a Republican businessman who became commissioner of Internal Revenue in 1997 and spent five years battling bogus shelters. Rossotti estimates that because the government is not collecting all that is owed -- the biggest piece of which is illegitimate tax shelters -- everyone else is paying 15 percent more than they should.

[RedEarth]

1. Thanks for the reminder.....nt