Transportation, Housing and Urban Development, and Related Agencies Appropriations Act, 2015

Floor Speech

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Madam Chair, I am in favor of the amendment. Hopefully, from the silence that we have heard, there is bipartisan support for this amendment because I know there is a bipartisan commitment here that competition is very much the American way.

If you have two companies, as happens all over America, competing on different government contracts, we usually come out with the best result from that competition. But the question with this amendment, which I am pleased to join the gentlelady from Connecticut in offering today, is whether we ought to advantage companies that renounce their American citizenship in favor of finding an office on the beach in Bermuda or in Ugland House in the Cayman Islands.

The other company is an American company, not only when it comes time to put its hand out for a government contract but also when it comes time to put its hand out to pay the taxes that it earned on its American business.

Which one of these companies should have a competitive advantage?

I think it is the one that stayed home and was an American, patriotic company and did not dodge its part of the responsibility for paying for our national security, which is so important to international commerce, and for other vital services.

American companies that stay and contribute to building America and that keep her secure at home and abroad deserve a level playing field, and that is all that this amendment does. If a Cayman company doesn't have to pay taxes on some of its income, of course it can underbid the company that stayed in America, that made it in America, that paid its taxes, and then asked to have a level playing field to compete for American business.

The history in this Congress, unfortunately, is that many very large companies pay their lobbyists more to lobby this Congress than they pay to the Treasury in taxes, and it has been a very wise investment because they have been able to have one loophole, one special preference, one advantage, one exception--one more bit of complexity to our Tax Code--in order to avoid paying their fair share.

The companies that are operating in the Cayman Islands and in Bermuda are reporting huge amounts of income earned in those countries, largely from stripping off earnings that they have here in America and shifting them there through interest gimmicks, through dividend gimmicks, through intellectual property gimmicks. They avoid paying taxes not only on the tiny amount that they might have earned from an occasional sale in the Cayman Islands but from all of the sales from which they are able to strip off earnings and shift them to this island paradise.

They are looking for, basically, a shell game. I am not talking about seashells on the beach in the Cayman Islands. I am talking about the shell game that exists when these companies come in, renounce their American citizenship, keep the form and operation of their business here in America, but claim that they are suddenly no longer citizens under the American flag that we honor but are under the flag of some foreign nation. They basically are sending Uncle Sam a postcard that reads: ``Sorry. You can find me on the beach. Glad you are not here.'' That is the answer that they give when it comes time to pay their taxes, but then they have the audacity to come and ask other taxpayers--other taxpaying businesses and individuals who have done their fair share, and then some, for American security--they ask for government business at taxpayer expense.

This amendment is set to send the executives a message: they can play all they want to on the beach to avoid taxes, but Congress is not going to put its head in the sand. They can have fun in the sun, but Congress refuses to let the rest of the Americans, who are working hard to pay their taxes, get burned by having to pay not only for the taxes that these tax dodgers haven't paid but for government contracts that are paid for with taxpayer money.

Let's support competition, and let's support American companies that are paying their fair share. Let's adopt this amendment.

I yield back the balance of my time.

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