Big Company Executives Attack Government on Inversion Stance

By Douglas A. McIntyre Updated Jan 13, 11:07AM EST · Published Apr 5, 5:17PM EDT

Follow 24/7 Wall St. on Google

This post may contain links from our sponsors and affiliates, and Flywheel Publishing may receive compensation for actions taken through them.

Big Company Executives Attack Government on Inversion Stance — © Wikimedia Commons

The Business Roundtable, the primary representatives of the chief executive officers of America’s largest companies, made a statement about business combinations that involve tax inversions. The comments came as a reaction to a rise in support to stop U.S. companies from moving headquarters overseas to save taxes.

The deal most immediately imperiled is between Pfizer Inc. and (NYSE: PFE) Allergan PLC (NYSE: AGN). While the Roundtable statement is self-serving, it does have a certain logic that the rules about inversions be clarified, especially to the benefit of multinationals:

Unilateral action by the Treasury, along with heated political rhetoric, are no substitute for cooperative, bipartisan legislation to address the non-competitive U.S. tax code.

Everyone, including the President, knows that real reform is the only way to stop companies from establishing their tax headquarters in foreign countries via ‘inversion.’

Additional, stop-gap regulation would fail to address the systemic anti-competitive nature of the U.S. tax system. ‘Inversions’ are not the answer either, but they are a self-help response to an outdated tax system that needs to be fixed.

Direct engagement between the Administration and Congress on tax reform is long overdue.”

[nativounit]

About the Author Douglas A. McIntyre →

Douglas A. McIntyre is the co-founder, chief executive officer and editor in chief of 24/7 Wall St. and 24/7 Tempo. He has held these jobs since 2006.

McIntyre has written thousands of articles for 24/7 Wall St. He is an expert on corporate finance, the automotive industry, media companies and international finance. He has edited articles on national demographics, sports, personal income and travel.

His work has been quoted or mentioned in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, NBC News, Time, The New Yorker, HuffPost USA Today, Business Insider, Yahoo, AOL, MarketWatch, The Atlantic, Bloomberg, New York Post, Chicago Tribune, Forbes, The Guardian and many other major publications. McIntyre has been a guest on CNBC, the BBC and television and radio stations across the country.

A magna cum laude graduate of Harvard College, McIntyre also was president of The Harvard Advocate. Founded in 1866, the Advocate is the oldest college publication in the United States.

TheStreet.com, Comps.com and Edgar Online are some of the public companies for which McIntyre served on the board of directors. He was a Vicinity Corporation board member when the company was sold to Microsoft in 2002. He served on the audit committees of some of these companies.

McIntyre has been the CEO of FutureSource, a provider of trading terminals and news to commodities and futures traders. He was president of Switchboard, the online phone directory company. He served as chairman and CEO of On2 Technologies, the video compression company that provided video compression software for Adobe’s Flash. Google bought On2 in 2009.