Inversion Moratorium Sets Up Tax Reform Negotiations

May 22, 2014

Democrats say the bill will combat transactions primarily made to avoid taxes, but the bill’s heightened threshold could also stop legitimate attempts to deal overseas, said Linda Swartz, chair of the tax group at Cadwalader Wickersham & Taft LLP. “The 50 percent line in the sand is clear and obvious. The effect of the 25 percent test with respect to other business in the U.S. takes a little more investigation and consideration to really appreciate the broad scope of that rule,” she said. “ A U.S. company that can invert under the proposed 50 percent test would also need to move significant U.S. operations offshore, a perverse result under a statute designed to keep companies in the U.S.”

- Linda Z. Swartz, Chair of the Tax group at Cadwalader, commenting in Law360 on the paradoxical implications for U.S. business of the “Stop Corporate Inversions Act of 2014” bill proposed by Senator Carl Levin on May 20, 2014, which seeks to place significantly more stringent limits on the ability of U.S. companies to relocate outside the U.S.