Shocking: Offshore tax havens of the US corporate elite

Tax money for tax cheats.

It's hard to otherwise describe the continuing federal bailouts that major US companies are enjoying in this woeful era of fiscal disaster, especially when--as a scandalous new report reveals--many of the key players aren't paying taxes.

The Government Accountability Office (GAO), Congress' investigative watchdog, has found that "a majority of America's largest publicly traded companies and the U.S. government's largest federal contractors use multiple subsidiaries in offshore tax havens to conduct business and avoid paying U.S. taxes," writes Carol D. Leonnig for The Washington Post.

The culprits include some corporate giants who are receiving countless millions in bailout money, Leonnig notes.

Democratic Sens. Byron Dorgan and Carl Levin, who released the report, say that companies such as Citigroup and Morgan Stanley have set up "hundreds of tax haven subsidiaries" in such inconspicuous nations as Luxembourg, Mauritius and the Cayman Islands.

Others figuring prominently in the corporate tax-haven list are such varied firms as 3M, American Express, Caterpillar, Cisco, ConocoPhillips, Dell, Dow Chemical, Exxon Mobil, FedEx, GM, Kraft, Merck, Pepsi, Pfizer, Procter & Gamble, Wachovia, and Rupert Murdoch's News Corporation, which tallied a whopping 782 foreign subsidiaries in 14 countries.

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