Political Quotes

“Mr. President, I will use 3 minutes to very briefly explain. Under the PATRIOT Act, Congress gave the Treasury the power to take a range of measures against foreign financial institutions, or jurisdictions that are defined as being of primary money-laundering concerns. The Levin-Conrad amendment just adopted would authorize the Treasury to impose the same types of measures on the same types of entities if Treasury finds them to be impeding U.S. tax enforcement. This amendment had been the subject of a bill for a number of years, and it comes out of the hearings of the Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, which I chair. Those investigation show each year the United States loses tens of billions of dollars in tax revenue from people using offshore tax havens to dodge U.S. tax obligations, including through hidden accounts at tax haven banks. We issued a lengthy, bipartisan report in the subcommittee. We detailed case history involving tax haven banks that help thousands of U.S. clients dodge their U.S. taxes, banks that used a long list of secrecy tricks that make it nearly impossible for U.S. tax authorities to trace funds sent to them offshore. Our amendment offers one provision from the Cut Unjustified Tax Loopholes Act, S. 2075, which Senator Conrad and I introduced some weeks ago.…”