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96–194 PDF 2015

S. Hrg. 114–88 

IMPACT OF THE U.S. TAX CODE ON THE MARKET 

FOR CORPORATE CONTROL AND JOBS 

HEARING 

BEFORE THE

PERMANENT SUBCOMMITTEE ON INVESTIGATIONS 

OF THE

COMMITTEE ON 

HOMELAND SECURITY AND 

GOVERNMENTAL AFFAIRS 

UNITED STATES SENATE 

ONE HUNDRED FOURTEENTH CONGRESS 

FIRST SESSION 

JULY 30, 2015 

Available via the World Wide Web: http://www.fdsys.gov 

Printed for the use of the 

Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs 

( 
(II) 

COMMITTEE ON HOMELAND SECURITY AND GOVERNMENTAL AFFAIRS 

RON JOHNSON, Wisconsin, Chairman 

JOHN MCCAIN, Arizona 

ROB PORTMAN, Ohio 

RAND PAUL, Kentucky 

JAMES LANKFORD, Oklahoma 

MICHAEL B. ENZI, Wyoming 

KELLY AYOTTE, New Hampshire 

JONI ERNST, Iowa 

BEN SASSE, Nebraska 

THOMAS R. CARPER, Delaware 

CLAIRE MCCASKILL, Missouri 

JON TESTER, Montana 

TAMMY BALDWIN, Wisconsin 

HEIDI HEITKAMP, North Dakota 

CORY A. BOOKER, New Jersey 

GARY C. PETERS, Michigan 

KEITH B. ASHDOWN, Staff Director 

GABRIELLE A. BATKIN, Minority Staff Director 

JOHN P. KILVINGTON, Minority Deputy Staff Director 

LAURA W. KILBRIDE, Chief Clerk 

LAUREN CORCORAN, Hearing Clerk 

PERMANENT SUBCOMMITTEE ON INVESTIGATIONS 

ROB PORTMAN, Ohio Chairman 

JOHN MCCAIN, Arizona 

RAND PAUL, Kentucky 

JAMES LANKFORD, Oklahoma 

KELLY AYOTTE, New Hampshire 

BEN SASSE, Nebraska 

CLAIRE MCCASKILL, Missouri 

JON TESTER, Montana 

TAMMY BALDWIN, Wisconsin 

HEIDI HEITKAMP, North Dakota 

BRIAN CALLANAN, Staff Director 

MARGARET DAUM, Minority Staff Director and Chief Counsel 

KELSEY STROUD, Chief Clerk 
(III) 

C O N T E N T S 

Opening statements: Page 

Senator Portman .............................................................................................. 1 

Senator McCaskill ............................................................................................ 4 

Senator Johnson ............................................................................................... 7 

Senator Lankford .............................................................................................. 18 

Senator Ayotte .................................................................................................. 24 

WITNESSES 

THURSDAY, JULY 30, 2015 

Jim Koch, Founder and Chairman, Boston Beer Company ................................. 8 

David E.I. Pyott, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer, Allergan .................... 10 

Walter J. Galvin, Vice Chairman, and Chief Financial Officer, Emerson .......... 12 

Howard B. Schiller, Chief Financial Officer, and Board of Directors, Valeant 

Pharmaceuticals International, Inc. ................................................................... 31 

Joshua Kobza, Chief Financial Officer, Restaurant Brands International ......... 33 

ALPHABETICAL LIST OF WITNESSES

Galvin, Walter J.: 

Testimony .......................................................................................................... 12 

Prepared statement .......................................................................................... 54 

Kobza, Joshua: 

Testimony .......................................................................................................... 33 

Prepared statement with attachment ............................................................. 70 

Koch, Jim: 

Testimony .......................................................................................................... 8 

Prepared statement .......................................................................................... 47 

Pyott, David E.I.: 

Testimony .......................................................................................................... 10 

Prepared statement .......................................................................................... 49 

Schiller, Howard B.: 

Testimony .......................................................................................................... 31 

Prepared statement .......................................................................................... 57 

APPENDIX 

Majority Staff Report ............................................................................................... 80 

Organisation for International Investment statement submitted for the 

Record 213 

Responses to post-hearing questions for the Record from Mr. Schiller .............. 216 

(1) 

IMPACT OF THE U.S. TAX CODE ON THE MARKET FOR CORPORATE CONTROL AND JOBS 

THURSDAY, JULY 30, 2015 

U.S. SENATE, PERMANENT SUBCOMMITTEE ON INVESTIGATIONS, OF THE COMMITTEE ON HOMELAND SECURITY

AND GOVERNMENTAL AFFAIRS, Washington, DC. 

The Subcommittee met, pursuant to notice, at 9:32 a.m., in room 

SD–342, Dirksen Senate Office Building, Hon. Rob Portman, Chairman of the Subcommittee, presiding. 

Present: Senators Portman, Lankford, Ayotte, Sasse, Johnson (ex 

officio), and McCaskill. 

Staff present: Brian Callanan, Mark Angher, Matt Owen, Andrew Polesovsky, Daniel Strunk, Gabriel Krimm, Arielle Goldberg, 

Brandon Reavis, Sarah Garcia, Mel Beras, Tom McDonald, Amanda Montee, Emerson Sprick, Kelsey Stroud, Zachary Rudisill, Liz 

Herman, Samantha Roberts, Satya Thallam, Bryan Barkley, and 

Chris Barkley. 

OPENING STATEMENT OF SENATOR PORTMAN 

Senator PORTMAN. Good morning. Thank you all for being here, 

and I appreciate the fact that Chairman Johnson joined us, too. 

I want to begin by thanking Claire McCaskill. This is Senator 

McCaskill’s and my first hearing together as Chair and Ranking 

Member of the Subcommittee. I am glad to have a chance to team 

up with her again. We actually led a Subcommittee on Oversight 

in the last Congress. I was in that chair, she was in this chair. But 

we worked very well together, and as some of you know, she is a 

former State auditor and a prosecutor all in one, so she is very effective at oversight. And we will see that again today and going forward with so many of our projects. 

This is a unique organization, this Subcommittee. The Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations (PSI) has investigative powers that allow us to do deeper dives in conducting our oversight of 

the Federal bureaucracy. We also want to use this Subcommittee 

to build a foundation for policy, and that is really what we are 

doing today. And then, finally, we are going to be rooting out some 

private wrongdoing that warrants a public response. Together, Senator McCaskill and I have a number of very interesting, long-term 

projects underway at PSI today that would fit in each one of these 

three categories. 

This morning, we are going to focus on an important policy issue, 

as I say, and that is, frankly, how the U.S. Tax Code affects the 
2 

market for corporate control. This topic involves the jargon of corporate finance, as we will hear today, but what it really involves 

is jobs and investment. And it is negatively impacting our economy 

today because our Tax Code is not working. 

We see the headlines every week, practically, about the loss of 

some American corporate headquarters. More often than not, it is 

to a country that has a more competitive corporate tax rate—that 

is easy to find when you have the highest rate among all the developed countries—but also countries that have a different international system, a territorial system of taxation. 

Our Tax Code, frankly, just makes it hard to be an American 

company, and it puts U.S. workers at a disadvantage. At a 39-percent combined State and Federal rate, the United States does have 

the highest rate among the industrialized world. Adding insult to 

injury, our government taxes American businesses for the privileges of taking their overseas profits and reinvesting them here at 

home, which is something we should be encouraging, not discouraging. 

Economists will tell us that this burden of our tax on the corporate side falls primarily on workers in the form of lower wages, 

fewer job opportunities, and, again, that is really what is at stake 

here. 

All of our competitors have cut their corporate taxes and eliminated repatriation taxes, including our neighbor to the north; just 

about all of them have. We have not touched our corporate tax rate 

really since the 1980s. We have not changed our international code 

in any significant way since the 1960s. In the meantime, every one 

of our competitors has. As a result, too many American businesses 

are headed for the exit, and this is at a loss of thousands of American jobs. 

The unfortunate reality is that U.S. businesses are often more 

valuable in the hands of foreign acquirers who can reduce their tax 

bills. It is one reason that you see this big increase in foreign acquisitions of U.S. companies. Last year, we now know, the number 

of foreign takeovers increased. In fact, last year it doubled to $275 

billion from the year before. So doubling in terms of the value of 

foreign acquisitions of U.S. companies last year from the previous 

year. 

This year, we are on track to surpass $400 billion—so it went 

from $275 to $400 billion—according to Dealogic, again, far outpacing the increase in overall global mergers and acquisitions. 

It should be very clear that foreign investment in the United 

States is essential to economic growth. We want more of it. That 

is not the issue. But we want a Tax Code that does not distort ownership decisions by handicapping U.S. businesses. That is not good 

for our U.S. economy, and that is what we have today. 

What is happening is that the current tax system increasingly 

drives U.S. businesses into the hands of those best able to reduce 

their tax liabilities, not necessarily those best equipped to create 

jobs and increase wages here at home. That is, of course, bad for 

American workers and bad for our long-term competitiveness as a 

country. 

To better understand the trend and inform legislative debate 

over tax reform, this Subcommittee has decided to take a hard look 
3 

at this issue. Over the past several months, the Subcommittee has 

reviewed more than a dozen recent major foreign acquisitions of 

U.S. companies and mergers in which U.S. firms relocated overseas. Again, this was a bipartisan project. Senator McCaskill’s experienced team at PSI worked with us every step of the way. I am 

grateful for that. 

Today’s hearing is the culmination of that hard work. We will 

hear directly both from U.S. companies that have felt the tax-driven pressures to move offshore and from foreign corporations whose 

tax advantages have turbocharged their growth by acquisition. 

One such foreign company is Quebec-based Valeant Pharmaceuticals. Over the past 4 years, as we will talk about, Valeant has 

managed to acquire a slew of U.S. companies worth more than $30 

billion. The Subcommittee reviewed key deal documents to understand how tax advantages affected Valeant’s three largest acquisitions to date, including the 2013 sale of New York-based eye care 

firm Bausch & Lomb and the 2015 sale of North Carolina-based 

drug maker Salix. We learned that in those two transactions alone, 

Valeant determined it could shave more than $3 billion off the target company’s tax bills by integrating them into the Canadianbased corporate group. Those tax savings meant that Valeant’s investments in its American targets would have higher returns and 

pay for themselves more quickly—two key drivers, of course, of any 

acquisition. All three Valeant acquisitions we studied, unfortunately, came with job loss in the United States. 

Beyond inbound acquisitions, America is also losing corporate 

headquarters through mergers in which U.S. companies relocate 

overseas. The latest news is the U.S. agricultural business 

Monsanto’s proposed $45 million merger with its European counterpart, Syngenta. A key part of that proposed deal, as we understand it, is a new global headquarters not in the United States but 

in London. 

To better understand this trend, the Subcommittee chose to review in detail the 2014 merger of Burger King with the Canadian 

coffee and donut chain Tim Hortons, an $11.4 billion agreement 

that sent Burger King’s corporate headquarters north of the border. 

A review showed that Burger King had strong business reasons to 

team up with Tim Hortons. But the record also shows that when 

deciding where to locate the headquarters of the combined firm, tax 

considerations ruled out the United States. 

At the time Burger King estimated that pulling Tim Hortons into 

the worldwide U.S. tax net rather than relocating to Canada would 

destroy up to $5.5 billion in value over just 5 years—$5.5 billion 

in an $11 billion deal. Think about that. 

The company concluded it was necessary to put the headquarters 

in a country that would allow it to reinvest overseas earnings back 

in the United States and Canada without an additional tax hit. 

They ultimately chose, of course, Tim Hortons’ home base of Canada. 

Both Valeant and Burger King played by the rules. I think that 

is an important point to be made. They and their deal partners responded to economic pressures, opportunities, and incentives created by our tax laws. If there is a villain in this story, it is the U.S. 
4 

Tax Code. And, frankly, it is Washington not doing what Washington should be doing to reform it. 

My goal is to use these examples this morning and others we will 

hear about today to better understand the need to overhaul our 

broken corporate Tax Code and put U.S. businesses and workers on 

a level playing field. 

Again, I thank the witnesses for being here, and I would like to 

hear now from Senator McCaskill her opening statement. 

OPENING STATEMENT OF SENATOR MCCASKILL 

Senator MCCASKILL. Thank you so much, Chairman Portman. 

Let me say what a great honor it is to sit on this dais for the 

first time as the Ranking Member of the Permanent Subcommittee 

on Investigations. This is the Truman Committee. This Committee 

was formed when Harry Truman got in his car with no staff and 

drove around the country investigating war profiteering in World 

War II. This is how he made his reputation in the U.S. Senate, and 

many historians say it was his work on this Committee that vaulted him into consideration for the Vice Presidency and ultimately 

the Presidency of the United States. 

I am a huge Harry Truman fan for many reasons. His mouth 

used to get him in trouble almost as much as my mouth gets me 

in trouble. And he also did some courageous things that were not 

poll-driven in his day. I am honored to hold his seat in the Senate, 

and I am thrilled—it is a lifelong dream—to be able to sit on this 

investigative Subcommittee and try to do the kind of work that taxpayers would be proud of. 

I know that Chairman Portman and I can work together well in 

a bipartisan way to uphold PSI’s long history of bipartisanship in 

a way that is worthy of President Truman’s legacy. 

I am also pleased to see a long-time Missouri business here 

today—Emerson Electric Company, now celebrating 125 years in 

St. Louis. Mr. Galvin, we are happy to have you here today to offer 

your thoughts on this important issue. 

Today I think we are in agreement that the current U.S. tax system is broken and needs reform. Our corporate tax rate is among 

the highest in the industrialized world. Our worldwide tax system 

is out of sync with the territorial models our economic peers have 

implemented. We lag behind other countries in the Organisation 

for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) in the value 

of the research credits we provide, and we risk losing out as our 

European allies move forward with new plans to incentivize the 

flow of intellectual property to their borders. 

On a very timely note, we are putting the Export-Import Bank 

in jeopardy of existence, which is also another tool that our manufacturers use in this country to compete on a worldwide basis, since 

most of our economic peers have a similar type of bank in their 

countries that is helping finance exports and imports. 

We see the effects of these problems every day. We see more and 

more profits and intellectual property shifted out of the United 

States to low-tax jurisdictions overseas. We see U.S. companies 

stashing over $2 trillion in earnings overseas to avoid the tax rate 

they would face upon bringing that money back to our shores. And 
5 

we see increasing numbers of U.S. companies heading for the exits, 

whether through an inversion or by otherwise relocating overseas. 

At the same time, we are witnessing a huge upswing in cross- border mergers and acquisitions activity—$1.3 trillion in deals in 

2014 alone, with foreign takeovers of U.S. companies accounting for 

$275 billion of that total. This is double the value of takeovers in 

2013, and every expectation is the boom will continue throughout 

2015. This increasing trend merits an examination about the 

causes of this merger impact and the larger impact on jobs, tax revenue, and innovation. 

Some argue that, absent the advantages the U.S. Tax Code provides to foreign multinational corporations, many of the U.S. companies acquired in these takeovers could have remained in American hands. In this view, the combination of a high U.S. corporate 

tax rate and a worldwide taxation system makes U.S. acquirers uncompetitive, while foreign acquirers can employ aggressive tax 

planning strategies that boost the value of U.S. assets and allow 

them to make higher offers. 

The reality may not be quite so simple. We know from previous 

hearings before this Subcommittee that many U.S. multinational 

corporations are adept at avoiding repatriation of their overseas 

earnings and are just as active as their foreign counterparts in 

shifting income and IP out of the United States. As a result, effective corporate tax rates for some U.S. multinationals can fall below 

the low statutory rates in other countries. 

In 2013, for example, the Government Accountability Office 

(GAO) reported that the 2010 effective worldwide U.S. corporate 

tax rate for profitable companies was only 12.6 percent. Similarly, 

a study from the University of Michigan found that the effective 

tax rates of the 100 largest U.S. multinationals from 2001 to 2010 

were actually lower than the rates for the 100 largest multinationals in the European Union. 

The solutions offered to address the competitiveness gap between 

U.S. multinationals and foreign multinationals are also not quite 

so clear cut. Tax experts estimate that because of profit shifting 

techniques by foreign multinationals, U.S. companies will remain 

at a disadvantage so long as the U.S. statutory corporate rate is 

above 15 percent—which is significantly below the rates in previous bipartisan tax reform proposals. The move to a territorial 

system also carries the risk of providing greater incentives for companies to shift profits overseas, and a territorial model without 

stringent rules to prevent abuse and ensure transparency could 

cost taxpayers over $100 billion over 10 years. Many other countries are employing an ‘‘innovation box’’ through which business income derived from intellectual property development is taxed at a 

preferential rate. This is a very promising approach, but there are 

challenges. We have to determine which IP rights we should protect and the types of research and development (R&D) activity that 

we should incentivize. 

As we move forward in this discussion, I want us to keep a few 

points in mind. 

First, I believe that U.S. competitiveness ultimately depends on 

continued investment in public goods like our world-class research 

universities, our highly skilled workforce, our strong rule of law, 
6 

and infrastructure that is needed to support business activity in 

the 21st Century. As a result, we should guard against any tax reform measures that threaten to erode the U.S. tax base and undermine these very clear-cut advantages the United States of America 

offers to the business world. This effort will require implementing 

anti-abuse provisions to ensure a shift to a territorial system does 

not provide an even greater incentive for multinationals to move 

profits overseas. 

Second, tax reform—particularly revenue-neutral tax reform— 

will necessarily involve gains for some and losses for others. As we 

discuss the challenges U.S. multinationals face, we should not lose 

sight of the challenges faced by domestic U.S. businesses—the companies that account for four out of five jobs in this country. These 

businesses already operate at a tax disadvantage relative to their 

multinational competitors, and they should not lose out on tax 

credits that support domestic manufacturing and research and development to compensate for lowering taxes on foreign income. 

Finally, we should resist the urge to demonize foreign companies 

operating inside the United States. Foreign direct investment 

brings $3 trillion to the U.S. economy. For every non-U.S. company 

that grows through rapid acquisition and severe cuts to research 

and development and employment, countless others invest in their 

communities and provide much needed manufacturing jobs. Robust 

foreign direct investment in the United States is not just a consequence of globalized competition; it is a tremendous advantage 

for our economy. Our challenge is to ensure that when U.S. companies choose to grow their businesses through domestic acquisition, 

our Tax Code does not tip the scales in favor of foreign acquirers. 

My hope for the hearing today is that our witnesses can help us 

understand the role the U.S. Tax Code plays in competition between U.S. acquirers and foreign acquirers. I also hope we can gain 

insight into how the Code influences corporate decision-making and 

how we can address the problems in the existing tax system while 

still ensuring that the United States continues to build the infrastructure and maintain the tax base necessary to be a leader in innovation, research and development, and business opportunities. 

I think I could not agree more with the Chairman. Our Tax Code 

is broken. Our Tax Code needs to be fixed. We are going to have 

to have the political will to do it. And blaming companies for doing 

the math that our Tax Code represents is a waste of time. And 

what Congress needs to do instead is hold the mirror up to ourselves because it is our inability to come together and compromise 

in a comprehensive way that is holding us back from reforming our 

Tax Code in a way that levels the playing field for our businesses, 

not just in the global marketplace, but right here in the United 

States of America. 

I look forward to working hard with my colleague Senator 

Portman and Senator Johnson and other Republicans, Senator 

Lankford, to find those compromises necessary to level that playing 

field and quit blaming companies for simply doing the math. 

Thank you, Mr. Chairman. 

Senator PORTMAN. Thank you, and great points. 

Senator Johnson has to go to another hearing in a moment, so 

I am going to ask him if he has a brief opening statement as well. 
7 

And, Senator Lankford, thank you for joining us as well. Senator 

Johnson. 

OPENING STATEMENT OF CHAIRMAN JOHNSON 

Chairman JOHNSON. I will be very brief. 

First of all, I just want to commend both the Chairman and the 

Ranking Member for holding this first hearing. I think it is very 

appropriate. If you take a look at the weaknesses in our system 

that are preventing us from growing, it really is a very uncompetitive tax system. And, I really appreciate Senator McCaskill’s saying 

we should not be demonizing businesses and we should be looking 

at these structural problems we have, and we should be 

incentivizing job creation, pointing out that the true villain really 

is a Tax Code that is completely uncompetitive. 

I come from the business world. A basic principle in business is 

benchmarking yourself against your competition. Well, as a Nation 

state, we have to do the same thing. We have to benchmark our 

Tax Code, our regulatory environment, against our global competitors. It is not that hard to do. What is difficult is developing the 

political will and achieving those compromises to actually enact it. 

So, again, I have read the briefing. I think the staff—I want to 

commend them as well—has done an excellent job of laying out the 

case. I have often said that the first step in solving any problem 

is you have to properly define it and you have to admit you have 

it. And so rather than demonizing businesses, let us point out that 

the villain here really is a very uncompetitive Tax Code. This is 

that first steps in defining the problem so we can take—the real 

first step is admitting we have it. 

And, again, I just want to commend you. I wish I could be here 

for the whole hearing. I will pop in and out as best I can. This is 

an excellent first hearing, so thank you. 

Senator PORTMAN. Thank you, Senator Johnson. 

We will now call our first panel of witnesses for this morning’s 

hearing. The hearing is entitled ‘‘The Impact of the U.S. Tax Code 

on the Market for Corporate Control and Jobs.’’ I would like to welcome our three panelists here on the first panel. 

The first one is Jim Koch. Jim is founder of the Boston Beer 

Company, the brewer of Sam Adams beer. 

The second is David Pyott. David is the former Chairman of the 

Board and Chief Executive Officer (CEO) of Allergan. Thank you, 

David. 

And then Walter Galvin is here. He is the former Vice Chairman 

and Chief Financial Officer (CFO) of Emerson Electric. 

All three have great experience and expertise to bring to bear on 

this, and we appreciate their willingness to come forward this 

morning. 

I would ask you to stick with our timing system this morning. 

All of your written statements will be included in the record, and 

we want to have plenty of time for questions with you. We are 

going to ask you to limit your oral testimony, if you could, to 5 minutes. Mr. Koch. 
8 

1The prepared statement of Mr. Koch appears in the Appendix on page 47. 

TESTIMONY OF JIM KOCH,1 FOUNDER AND CHAIRMAN, 

BOSTON BEER COMPANY 

Mr. KOCH. Thank you, Chairman Portman, Ranking Member 

McCaskill, Senator Johnson, Senator Lankford. It is an honor to be 

here today as your Subcommittee investigates how the current corporate tax structure in the United States should be reformed to 

lessen the obstacles to starting, growing, and maintaining an 

American business. 

It is a little uncomfortable for me because I am not used to talking without a beer in front of me, but I will try to do it on plain 

old water. [Laughter.] 

Senator MCCASKILL. We could probably send out for one if you 

need one. If you get halfway through it and you need a beer, just 

let us know. 

Mr. KOCH. That would be good. Thank you. 

The Boston Beer Company had humble beginnings. I used my 

great-great grandfather’s recipe actually from the Soulard district 

of West St. Louis, where his brewery stood in the 19th Century. 

And I started brewing in my kitchen in 1984. I went from bar to 

bar to sell the idea of a rich, flavorful American beer, which was 

quite novel. Thirty years ago, I named my beer after the American 

revolutionary and Founding Father Samuel Adams, whose statue 

stands in the capitol representing Massachusetts. Boston Lager 

was released in April 1985. And 6 weeks later, it got picked as the 

‘‘Best Beer in America’’ at the Great American Beer Festival. 

Today, our family of beers includes over 60 varied and constantly 

changing styles of beer. We are now available in all 50 States and 

in 30 foreign countries. Today Boston Beer Company is a team 

made up of 1,300 American employees with breweries in Boston, in 

Cincinnati where I grew up, and in Pennsylvania. We have invested over $300 million in those breweries in the last 3 years, and 

we are proud that today the craft beer industry, which when I 

started was just a handful of semi-lunatics, has grown to over 

3,600 local businesses all across the United States. 

But despite that growth, today almost 90 percent of the beer 

made in the United States is made by foreign-owned companies. 

And foreign-owned breweries have now begun acquiring American 

craft brewers with 9 of the most successful ones having been acquired in recent years. So I am concerned that growing and expanding an American-owned brewery is increasingly difficult because our corporate tax structure places American-owned companies at a competitive disadvantage to our foreign counterparts. 

It is not uncommon for me to receive visits from investment 

bankers interested in facilitating the sale or the merger of Boston 

Beer Company to foreign ownership. One of the principal financial 

benefits of such a transaction is to reduce the tax rate we pay. We 

are vulnerable because we currently report all 100 percent of our 

income in the United States, and as a result, we pay a tax rate of 

about 38 percent on all of that income. Under foreign ownership, 

that rate, I am told by investment bankers, would be reduced to 

the range of 25 to 30 percent immediate through various practices 

like expatriation of intellectual property, earnings stripping and 
9 

the strategic use of debt, offshoring of services, and transfer pricing. So that means that a dollar of pre-tax earnings is worth 62 

cents to me under American ownership but about 72 cents under 

foreign ownership. To put it another way, Boston Beer Company is 

worth 16 percent more to a foreign owner simply because of the 

current U.S. tax structure. 

Why haven’t we sold Boston Beer Company to a multinational or 

another foreign entity? The simple answer: It is just not who we 

are. I named my beer ‘‘Samuel Adams’’ after our patriot namesake. 

We were born in America. We have grown because of the advantages available in the United States, and we do not mind paying 

our taxes here in the United States in gratitude for the opportunities that exist in this country and that I certainly have enjoyed. 

But do not mistake that for good financial decisionmaking. I have 

to explain to shareholders why we have not taken advantage of 

some of the strategies available to reduce our corporate tax burden 

by moving overseas. In response to economic pressures, other companies are saving millions, or hundreds of millions of dollars 

through complex tax planning every year. And rest assured Senators, while we are sitting here talking about corporate tax reform, 

there are folks in offices and boardrooms all over the world making 

their own version of corporate tax reform every day. The difference 

is that not one of them is accountable to your constituents. So Congress’ inaction on this subject has created a system of do-it-yourself 

corporate tax reform that is available to few and understood by 

even fewer. Because of our broken corporate tax system, I can honestly predict that I will likely be the last American owner of the 

Boston Beer Company. 

Due to hard work, innovation, and diligence, American craft 

brewers have created thousands of well-paying manufacturing jobs 

and created respect for American beer all around the world. I know 

of no manufacturing sector in the United States that has grown for 

30 straight years and achieved double-digit growth for 16 straight 

quarters. But when these foreign acquisitions occur, American jobs 

are often cut or shipped overseas, less investment is made here in 

the United States, and other cost-cutting measures on management 

and sales forces are implemented along with reductions in local 

philanthropy and community involvement. 

The solutions are pretty clear: Cut the highest-in-the-world U.S. 

corporate tax rate to the mid-20s; bring America’s international tax 

system in line with the rest of the industrialized world by allowing 

U.S. companies to bring their overseas earnings home—just like 

the British and Canadians allow their businesses to do. And Senator Portman’s recent proposal with Senator Schumer provides a 

strong, bipartisan road map on the international piece of tax reform. With these reforms, I believe we can unleash a lot of job creation and innovation in this country. And without them, I fear 

America will fall behind economically. 

Thank you. 

Senator PORTMAN. Thank you, Mr. Koch. Mr. Pyott. 
10 

1The prepared statement of Mr. Pyott appears in the Appendix on page 49. 

TESTIMONY OF DAVID E.I. PYOTT,1 CHAIRMAN AND CHIEF 

EXECUTIVE OFFICER (1998–2015), ALLERGAN 

Mr. PYOTT. Thank you, Chairman Portman and Ranking Member 

McCaskill, Senators Johnson and Lankford. 

My name is David Pyott, and I am the former Chairman and 

CEO of Allergan. Until it was acquired by Actavis in March 2015, 

Allergan was a great 65-year-old American pharmaceutical company, a world leader in ophthalmology, medical aesthetics, and 

Botox therapeutic as well as cosmetic. 

In my 17-year tenure as CEO, Allergan experienced tremendous 

growth, going from $600 million in sales in 1997 to more than $7 

billion in 2014. Lots of jobs were created, going from 4,000 to 

10,500. 

Growth was principally organic and R&D-driven. Allergan’s R&D 

investments increased from less than $100 million in 1997 to over 

$1 billion in 2014, leading to a steady stream of regulatory approvals by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA). 

In early 2014, Allergan’s outlook was bright: We projected double-digit revenue growth and mid-teens increases in earnings per 

share for the next 5 years. 

But, ultimately, those qualities—sustained growth, robust R&D, 

and $4 billion in cash, most of it located overseas—made Allergan 

a very attractive target for acquisition, especially for a foreign company. 

The U.S. Tax Code, as we have heard, creates advantages that 

are worth billions for foreign acquirers to buy up American companies. 

So what happened in 2014? We were targeted by Valeant, a Canadian company that has acquired over 100 pharmaceutical, medical device, and OTC companies in the last 7 years in a roll-up 

strategy. Valeant has the clear strategy of not investing in R&D. 

Valeant had just completed an $8 billion acquisition of Bausch & 

Lomb in 2013 and was too weak and laden with debt from that 

transaction to be able to buy Allergan on its own. So Valeant entered into a partnership with Pershing Square, run by activist investor Bill Ackman, to go after Allergan together. It was the firstever partnership of its type. In the February to April 2014 timeframe, using stock purchases and then options and derivatives, 

Pershing Square was able to accumulate 9.7 percent of Allergan’s 

shares without making any public announcement. 

On April 22, Valeant bid $47 billion to buy Allergan, an increase 

from the $37 billion valuation when Pershing Square initiated its 

first purchases of stock, a premium, obviously, of $10 billion, or 

about 25 percent. Such a premium was enabled by the enormous 

tax savings available to Valeant, with a 3-percent worldwide corporate tax rate, allied with their rapacious cost-cutting plan. 

In its pitch to investors, the Valeant plan was to reduce 

Allergan’s 26 percent effective tax rate to 9 percent, a difference of 

17 percent, or $500 million per year. Applying a price earnings 

multiple to this $500 million, this gives Valeant and Pershing 

Square roughly a $9 billion valuation advantage. In simple terms, 
11 

thinking back to the math, Allergan was worth $9 billion more— 

simply by being moved to foreign domicile. 

On the day of announcing the bid, Pershing Square interestingly 

posted a profit of almost $1 billion. I sincerely hope that the SEC 

will investigate this novel structure regarding possible breach of 

the insider trading laws and other securities regulations. 

But back to Valeant. The Allergan Board felt that the offer substantially undervalued the company. Valeant’s plan was also to 

strip Allergan, cutting overall operating expenses by 47 percent, 

slashing R&D within that from more than $1 billion to just over 

$200 million per year, along with other market-building investments. 

Valeant planned to load up Allergan with more than $22 billion 

in new debt, taking the debt load of the combined company to more 

than $50 billion. 

After assessing many strategic alternatives, the Allergan Board 

ultimately decided to seek out a so-called white knight. Of the potential suitors, it was clear to me that only a foreign-domiciled 

company could be in a position to outbid Valeant while still creating value for their own stockholders. Obviously, as we have 

heard, foreign acquirers have lucrative tools: debt pushdown, migration of intellectual property. Valeant contemplated both. 

In November 2014, Irish-domiciled Actavis bid $66 billion for 

Allergan. Similar to Valeant, Actavis could immediately reduce 

Allergan’s effective tax rate—from 26 percent to 15 percent. Beyond 

just selling to the highest bidder, the Allergan Board assessed an 

acquirer’s commitment to innovation. Unlike Valeant, Actavis was 

and is committed to maintaining the best of Allergan in the combined company. 

Given the premium that had to be paid to secure control of our 

company, cost synergies, of course, had to be found, about $1.8 billion, a modest 11 percent of operating expenses across both companies. 

As for jobs, I am no longer with the company, but estimate that 

about 1,500 jobs will be eliminated from the legacy Allergan side, 

mostly in California. The reduction in R&D thank goodness has 

been modest. 

With this sale, we could salvage what we could of a great American company. The last operating year was the best in our 65-year 

history. Sales increased by 16 percent, or over $1 billion to $7.1 billion. As a point of pride, Actavis adopted Allergan as the new corporate name in June 2015. 

Looking back, I am convinced that Allergan today would have remained an independent, American company had it not been for the 

significant disadvantages caused by our uncompetitive U.S. corporate tax system. The implications are clear, not only for the 

pharmaceutical and biotech industry, but extend across many industries that are global. Unless Congress acts, I believe that many 

more innovative American companies will be lost. 

Thank you for the opportunity to testify about my interesting experience. 

Senator PORTMAN. Thank you, Mr. Pyott. Mr. Galvin. 
12 

1The prepared statement of Mr. Galvin appears in the Appendix on page 54. 

TESTIMONY OF WALTER J. GALVIN,1 VICE CHAIRMAN (OCTOBER 2009–FEBRUARY 2013), AND CHIEF FINANCIAL OFFICER 

(1993–2010), EMERSON 

Mr. GALVIN. Good morning, Chairman Portman, Ranking Member McCaskill, and Members of the Committee. My name is Walter 

Galvin. I am the former Vice Chairman and Chief Financial Officer 

of Emerson, a $25 billion global manufacturing company founded 

in St. Louis 125 years ago. Emerson has over 110,000 employees 

and operations in more than 150 countries. In each of the last 3 years, Emerson paid $1.3 billion in taxes 

worldwide. Over half was paid in the United States. 

Emerson’s business is global. Over 55 percent of our sales are 

outside the United States, and several of our major competitors are 

domiciled abroad. Being domiciled in the United States means we 

pay more in taxes on a worldwide basis. 

My testimony will focus on three areas: first, why America’s tax 

cost on foreign profits is such a disadvantage to U.S. companies; 

second, how other nations have set examples we can follow; and, 

third, how Emerson can serve as an example of an American-based 

multinational that lost out to foreign competitors because of our 

Tax Code. 

To begin, the combination of our high corporate tax rate and the 

way the U.S. taxes foreign profits can make U.S. companies more 

valuable in foreign hands—which is leading to American businesses being stripped away. 

A recent analysis by Ernst & Young found that, from 2004 

through 2013, foreign buyers acquired $179 billion more of U.S. 

companies than we acquired of theirs. Additionally, data provider 

Dealogic reports that the gross value of foreign takeovers of U.S. 

companies doubled last year to $275 billion and, at the current 

rate, will surpass $400 billion this year. These takeovers reflect 

thousands of U.S. companies leaving American shores. 

How can we stop this accelerating exodus? Congress must remove the premium only American companies pay by moving to a 

territorial system and reducing the top corporate tax rate. 

We know it can be done. Other nations, like the United Kingdom 

(U.K.), have successfully reduced their top rates. In 2009, the 

United Kingdom switched to a territorial system while their corporate rate stood at 28 percent. Now that rate is 20 percent, and 

earlier this month, the United Kingdom released a plan to drop 

that rate further to 18 percent. 

Companies are taking note. Monsanto, an American company 

also founded in St. Louis more than 100 years ago, is attempting 

to merge with a competitor and set up a new parent company in 

the United Kingdom. It is no mystery why. 

I have two real examples of how Emerson’s investors, shareholders, and employees have been directly impacted by America’s 

out-of-date Tax Code. 

In 2006, Emerson sought to acquire a company called American 

Power Conversion (APC), a Rhode Island-based producer of hightech electronic equipment. At that time over half of APC’s earnings 

were made outside the U.S. Emerson competed against Schneider 
13 

Electric, a French company, and Ohio-based Eaton Corporation to 

buy APC. 

Emerson valued the company at just under $5 billion, but 

Schneider ultimately acquired the company by bidding $5.5 billion. 

The principal reason Schneider’s valuation of APC was higher was 

due to the French tax law on repatriation. 

Headquartered in France, 95 percent of Schneider’s repatriated 

profits are exempt from French taxes, so APC’s profits are worth 

more to Schneider because they can be repatriated at a tax rate of 

under 2 percent. By contrast, if Emerson repatriated those earnings, we would be subject to a tax rate of approximately 17 percent. 

That 17 percent is the difference between our 35-percent corporate 

rate and foreign taxes we pay. The difference between Schneider’s 

rate of 2 percent and Emerson’s rate of 17 percent on a discounted 

cash-flow basis is worth $800 million more to Schneider. Therefore, 

Schneider was able to outbid Emerson, and what had once been an 

American company became a subsidiary of a French-domiciled company. 

As for Eaton, they dropped out of the bidding process early and 

about 6 years later acquired Ireland-based Cooper Industries. 

Eaton is now an Irish-domiciled company, enjoying a lower worldwide tax rate. 

Second, America’s worldwide system creates a perverse incentive 

to keep foreign profits abroad. A few years ago, Emerson bought a 

company in the United Kingdom called Chloride for about $1.5 billion with cash we had earned abroad and kept abroad. We considered other options for that cash, but the United States would have 

charged us 10 to 15 cents in taxes on every dollar we bring back 

home. So where will we get a higher expected return—from one 

dollar invested in the United Kingdom or only 85 cents in the 

United States? 

We need to reform the Tax Code sooner rather than later. Every 

time a company is acquired and the headquarters is moved, there 

is a real community impact. In addition to costing American jobs, 

this impacts local communities because of a decline in State and 

local taxes and a loss of corporate philanthropy and jobs. 

I am grateful that the Portman-Schumer framework is moving 

the conversation forward. 

In closing, we cannot expect to create more jobs at home if we 

continue to punish businesses like Emerson who want to remain 

headquartered here. America’s businesses and workers are the best 

in the world, and we are not asking for a tax handout. We are asking for a level playing field. With that, we can compete with anyone 

in the world and win. 

Thank you, and I welcome your questions. 

Senator PORTMAN. Thank you, Mr. Galvin. And, look, I appreciate all three of you being here and testifying, and specifically 

going into some detail on case studies that involved your companies. We want to focus on the facts here, and you have given us 

some great studies. 

We are going to have a couple rounds here. The first round will 

be 7 minutes each. The second round will be 5 minutes each. We 

have some colleagues who have shown up, and I know everybody 
14 

is under pressure, so I am going to try to keep my initial questions 

to less than 7 minutes. 

I want to focus on a couple things. One, what I am hearing from 

you all is that there are a number of problems with the U.S. Tax 

Code and the perverse effect it has on U.S. jobs and investment. 

One is you are just less competitive, and it makes more sense to 

have your businesses in the hands of a foreign acquirer because of 

the tax savings. And there are some amazing numbers you have 

provided us here today, to the extent to which that is true. 

Second, you talked about—and Mr. Galvin just mentioned the 

fact—that it is harder to grow as an American company, because 

when you are competing for acquiring another company, you are 

finding foreign competition coming in that can pay a premium because of their after-tax profits. 

And then third is this whole issue that you have all referenced 

but that Mr. Galvin talked about, which is when you have this 

lockout effect, you have the money stuck overseas because you cannot bring it back because of the prohibitively high rate, it is an incentive to make your investments overseas, all three of which are 

bad for U.S. jobs. 

So I guess I start with Mr. Koch, and I thought your analysis 

was really interesting. I heard you say something about investment 

bankers giving you a proposal frequently. Can you sort of pull back 

the curtain on that a little bit and tell us what is happening in the 

real world? Do you get proposals from investment bankers or others saying, why don’t you do this inversion or why don’t you make 

yourself a target for a foreign acquisition? 

Mr. KOCH. Sure. And as we heard from the other panelists, if you 

are an attractive American company, you have the things that 

characterize American business. Innovation and creativity, willingness to sort of create a new industry—those things are very attractive to foreign owners, and that puts you on the radar screen. So 

investment bankers, that is what they do. They find these opportunities, and they work both sides, put them together. So it is a regular feature of my life, talking to investment bankers who can do 

the math. 

Senator PORTMAN. Yes, so you have U.S. investment banking 

firms coming to your companies and saying, ‘‘Why don’t you do 

this? This makes sense for you.’’ 

One final question. You talked about the fact that you may be 

the last U.S. owner of your company, sadly, and you talked a little 

about the shareholder pressure. Are you responding to that shareholder pressure by saying, we can become a foreign company and 

maybe make some savings, but, we have a commitment to this 

country? And how does that conversation go? 

Mr. KOCH. Well, I am very fortunate, for two reasons. One, I 

have all the voting shares. [Laughter.] 

So that helps. It is a wonderful form of democracy. I vote. 

Senator PORTMAN. I wish I had that here. [Laughter.] 

Mr. KOCH. It is a good thing. And the other is under Massachusetts law, I am not legally required to maximize shareholder value. 

I am not legally required to run the company only for the benefit 

of shareholders. But under Massachusetts law, I am allowed to 
15 

take into account the interests of other stakeholders. So that is 

about as good as it gets. 

Senator PORTMAN. I suppose it is clear to everybody on the panel 

that that is a highly unusual situation, both in terms of having voting shares and also having this fiduciary responsibility be broader 

than it is in most of your cases. And I really appreciate your patriotism and your coming here today. 

Mr. Pyott, if you could tell us a little more about shareholder 

pressure yourself. You had an amazing story to tell. Among others, 

you talked about the fact that when Valeant first made an offer for 

your company, it offered about a 25-percent premium, as I heard 

it from you, and you thought that they had about a $9 billion valuation advantage related just to taxes, that meaning that Allergan 

was much more valuable in their hands just because of the Tax 

Code. 

Can you take us inside the board room for a minute? What were 

those conversations like? How do shareholders react to an offer like 

that? 

Mr. PYOTT. Well, as you can imagine, the intent both by Valeant, 

allied with Pershing Square, because they could do different things, 

one being an activist, one being a strategic, was basically to put us 

into a tub of boiling hot fat. That was very clear, to bring us to the 

negotiating table ASAP. 

Well, we stood back and, of course, we had a proud track record, 

because I was fortunate when I started at the end of 1997, the company was worth $2 billion. And thanks to the enormous growth 

that I spoke about, by the beginning of 2014 it was worth $37 billion on the New York Stock Exchange so people could not really 

complain that much about my team’s poor performance. 

So, of course, then comes the bid, and, of course, given the numbers I gave you, pretty much all of the bid premium was courtesy 

of the tax, right? So we knew this was, likely to be much higher, 

and, of course, we had our investment bankers at hand, and one 

of their principal jobs was to run numbers under various valuation 

metrics. What was the value of Allergan to a public shareholder? 

And it was very clear that the value was substantially higher than 

what was being offered, and so as a board, we could very much look 

in the mirror, look at ourselves, and say we have to do a lot better 

than this to get something approximating what we think—and not 

just we—the experts with our numbers reflect the true value. 

And so we then got into a huge fight that lasted 81⁄2 months, and 

I was screamed at, every time I went out, whether it was the 

media or especially the investment community to go and negotiate. 

And I said, look, I will not negotiate until there is a number on the 

table that is so close that one would think the market will clear. 

If somebody is a million miles off, beyond just shouting at each 

other, you do not get any reasonable outcome. 

And due to some major performance-enhancing measures we took 

ourselves, because we had to get into our own cost-cutting campaign—right?—to drive up earnings per share or to drive up the intrinsic value of the company, we were able to really move up the 

value. And, happily, due to the culture we have, the team did not 

get distracted because you can imagine people were saying, you are 

on a path to hell, because with all this media opprobrium, literally 
16 

I could not keep out of the newspaper for more than 2 days. I am 

sure you all know what that feels like. 

And I said to our team, if you do not focus on the business, we 

are lost. And they did a fantastic job, the best result for 65 years, 

which tells you about the spirit of the people. 

And so that is the way we just kept moving things along, always 

steadily increasing the value of the company, until we reached a 

point where, in fact, I knew I could no longer hold the line, although I was constantly thinking—do I really go to a shareholder 

vote? And I seriously thought of it. 

If I may, just one last thing, because I am giving you the various 

angles. The role of Pershing Square was very interesting, because, 

of course, having 10 percent of the vote out of the box is a powerful 

position. And then, clearly, the goal was to kind of create a wolf 

pack with those firms whose business is investment firms to pile 

in, in the so-called event-driven world of hedge funds. We were able 

to contain that whole community, Ackman plus the others, to actually 31 percent. And as you well know, 31 percent does not mean 

you lose the election. And my job was to win and keep the longoriented investors in our position so that we theoretically could 

have won, 50 and one percent would have done it—right?—to keep 

control of the board. And then I am sure you want to come back 

to how then Actavis came in from the other side. 

Senator PORTMAN. Yes, and I want to move on because I want 

to give my colleagues a chance to ask questions. 

Mr. PYOTT. Absolutely. 

Senator PORTMAN. But we are going to dig deeper into that, and 

also, Mr. Galvin, you are not off the hook here. I will be asking you 

some further questions in the second round, but I do want to go 

to my colleagues. Let me just make one comment, if I might. You 

were consistently named one of the best CEOs in America, and this 

was not a company that was floundering where an acquisition, 

might have made sense in order to change the management or to 

improve the business performance. This was tax-driven, clearly. So 

I think it is interesting to hear your story this morning, and, again, 

we will get into some further detail as to the next step and what 

the consequences were of the Tax Code on the actual acquisition 

and what has happened since. Senator McCaskill. 

Senator MCCASKILL. Thank you very much. 

I am curious, Mr. Koch. I confess I have not paid close enough 

attention to your marketing, but are you marketing that you are 

the largest American beer company in the United States of America? 

Mr. KOCH. Not really. I mean, we try to sell our beer on the quality of the beer, the care and—— 

Senator MCCASKILL. You might think about it. 

Mr. KOCH. OK. 

Senator MCCASKILL. I am just telling you. 

Mr. KOCH. OK. 

Senator MCCASKILL. I do not think most Americans realize that 

you are the largest fully owned American beer company. 

Mr. KOCH. It is sort of sad because we are little over one percent 

market share. 

Senator MCCASKILL. I get it, but I am just saying. 
17 

Mr. KOCH. It is kind of crazy. 

Senator MCCASKILL. I am just telling you, just for what it is 

worth. 

I wanted to go back momentarily, Mr. Pyott, to your testimony. 

Did you say that Pershing posted $1 billion of profit the day they 

tendered the bid? 

Mr. PYOTT. Very close. The number is $950 million. 

Senator MCCASKILL. Is that being investigated now? 

Mr. PYOTT. I sure hope so. But, of course, as you well know, if 

officials from the SEC come before you, they have to speak with 

enormous caution, and I have to admit that I have visited many 

Senators’ offices, many Members of the House of Representatives, 

doing my best to encourage whatever oversight is possible. 

Senator MCCASKILL. The former prosecutor in me kind of went, 

‘‘What did he just say?’’ 

Mr. PYOTT. Yes. Well, I mean, you can tell I’m a person of principle, and a lot of people in my shoes just move on. 

Senator MCCASKILL. Goodness. 

Mr. PYOTT. I am afraid I feel pretty strongly about a lot of things 

that happened last year. It was not just the Tax Code. You can say, 

the very slow reporting periods that our rules provide, are antiquated. Something has to happen in financial services as well. And 

those members agree with me. 

Senator MCCASKILL. Let me talk to you all about the anti-abuse 

erosion measures. If we move to a territorial tax system, which I 

think all of us understand is—everyone should understand is, I believe, inevitable, everyone agrees that it has to include measures 

to prevent abuse and to limit the erosion of the U.S. tax base. 

According to the Treasury Department, a territorial system without full rules on the allocation of expenses could result in $130 billion in lost revenue over 10 years. 

So, some proposals are committed to revenue neutrality, which 

has raised difficult questions about how we compensate for lost revenue as a result of lowering corporate tax rates. So I would like to 

hear your perspective as business leaders on these hard choices. 

What kind of anti-abuse measures do you see would work or that 

you might support so that we do not fix a system and then all of 

a sudden wake up the next day and realize it is being gamed by 

everybody shifting expenses to once again do the kind of math calculations that put you in the position you were in? Let us start 

with you, Walter, if you would. Do you have recommendations on 

how we can put some rules in place that would provide a cautionary note for the abuses that could occur? 

Mr. GALVIN. Well, my personal opinion would be you need to 

keep it relatively simple. You already have a tax rate with 35 percent base and all the earnings and profit calculations. So if you 

consider—and American corporations have always said a base rate 

of 5 percent is very attractive. A lot of the other international companies have a 2-percent base rate. So, internationally, if a company 

pays 10 percent in international taxes against the 15, they get that 

credit. They would only pay a 5-percent tax. But if an international 

company paid—a U.S.-based company paid a 2-percent international tax rate, which is probably suspicious even though totally 
18 

legal, they would have to pay an additional 8, or a total of 13 percent. So you would scale it back down. 

Certainly, for a lot of companies, if you look at what the international tax rates are where companies participate, it’s nowhere 

close to the tax rates currently being reported. So I think you need 

to do something. While it is a lot of work with the earnings and 

profit calculation, having a sliding scale between 5 and 15 should 

prevent some of the abuse, and companies that are paying a more 

ordinary tax rate over 10 percent should not have a problem with 

it. 

Senator MCCASKILL. Do you agree with that approach in terms 

of preventing the kind of abuses that could really erode our tax 

base? 

Mr. PYOTT. Well, my sort of general view is that I think if we 

can get our headline tax rate down into the same kind of target 

zone as the rest of the industrialized countries, then we have 

solved a lot of problems of what I call ‘‘around the edge.’’ And I 

think the whole matter of how you account for revenue, especially 

cost sharing, is pretty well laid out. 

I could talk a little bit about R&D partnerships because that is 

the big deal in the pharmaceutical industry where, clearly, to give 

you sort of a framework of what I meant: a company like ours, we 

could at the time make a choice of saying, OK, we will establish 

the intellectual property in Ireland. We had a very large operation 

Ireland, the biggest, in fact, outside the United States. We had 

thousands of employees in the Republic of Ireland. And, of course, 

if you do that and you say, OK, the Irish entity owns the intellectual property, if the drug finally makes it, that is a fantastic answer because their corporate tax rate is 12 percent. 

But the bad news is for somebody like me who, does not last forever, because CEOs normally last for 5 years, right? A few masochists like me did it for 17. In the short run, you do not get the 

deduction. So, obviously, if you did the same research in the United 

States, you get a full deduction as a legitimate business expense. 

But, of course, we did all that math and say presuming we win and 

we got the drug approved, that will still over a 20-year period be 

the right answer to position the intellectual property in this case 

in Ireland versus the United States. 

Senator MCCASKILL. So the deductibility of expenses was not sufficient to overcome the hurdle of what you would gain once you 

made it across the finish line in terms of the tax rate on the profits? 

Mr. PYOTT. That is right, 35 versus 12. There you go. 

Senator MCCASKILL. There you go. Math again. Thank you. 

Thank you, Mr. Chairman. 

Senator PORTMAN. Thank you. Senator Lankford. 

OPENING STATEMENT OF SENATOR LANKFORD 

Senator LANKFORD. Mr. Pyott, let me continue on that same line 

on the intellectual property issue. Intellectual property, how is that 

connecting with the repatriation issues, territorial, worldwide system? Do you see that in the same vein? Do you see that as separating that out? How would you handle that? Because if you are 

dealing with the intellectual property issues and ownership, what 
19 

do you see as the best resolution on that specific issue? Then, Mr. 

Galvin, I have a question coming back to you on some of your math 

you were just doing as well. 

Mr. PYOTT. Right. Well, at a very high level, I think, as I said 

before, resolving the headline tax rate is the real important thing. 

Around that, of course, there are other tools available that other 

countries have used, like the Netherlands, the United Kingdom in 

particular, on the innovation or patent box. And that will encourage where R&D takes place and where intellectual property is located. And, of course, just as I said before, once you know exactly 

what the rules are, then our peoples’ job is to set up a stream of 

numbers where you decide what is the best answer for that particular program and your own particular corporation. 

Senator LANKFORD. It does, but we are in this race that we are 

currently standing still while everyone else is running on the tax 

issues, when other countries drop their corporate rate and try to 

encourage people to come. We are in the same race on intellectual 

property as people continue to find innovative ways to be able to 

encourage R&D to happen in their country while we are standing 

still in it. So I guess the nature of my question is: What can we 

do as a Nation to encourage R&D to be here beyond just the rate 

itself? 

Mr. PYOTT. In addition to rate? 

Senator LANKFORD. Yes. 

Mr. PYOTT. I think a patent box would be helpful. It is not the 

solution. It would be a palliative or an aid. 

I think, earlier we heard from, in Senator McCaskill’s remarks, 

we have, thank goodness, still have some huge inherent advantages 

in the United States. And in our industry; pharmaceutical, biotech, 

most innovations occur here, and in my view, that is due to the 

knowledge base that we have, which is due to the country’s investment in National Institute of Health (NIH), in great universities, 

and then the whole financial system to enable startup companies 

to find capital and—— 

Senator LANKFORD. Right, but that is the asset side of it. 

Mr. PYOTT. The liability. 

Senator LANKFORD. The liability side of this. 

Mr. PYOTT. Yes, yes. So I think what I am trying to answer is 

to say, first and foremost, it has got to be rate. And then I think 

after that you can probably bridge some numbers, you know, if 

there is a difference between—I will toss out numbers—a 30-percent rate and a 25-percent rate by using these other tools, you can 

tilt the advantage back in the favor of the United States. 

Senator LANKFORD. Mr. Galvin, let me ask you a question about 

rates as well. There has been a lot of conversation about 25-percent 

rate and how that ends up being this normative rate in multiple 

countries. But you are also talking about countries that may be 12 

percent, 2 percent, whatever it may be, to try to compete there, intentionally setting a corporate rate low, where their individual 

rates may be much higher, but their corporate rate is low intentionally to target companies. 

So the question I have is: If we get a rate down to 25 percent, 

which has been discussed, or whatever that may be for a corporate 

rate, that does not really solve the problem, it does not seem like. 
20 

Mr. GALVIN. It makes a significant improvement in the situation. 

So if you could get the corporate or business tax rate—and I will 

use ‘‘business’’ rather than look at the legal entity, C corporations 

and everything else. If you made the business tax rate 25 percent 

and you put in place a territorial system that is similar to the vast 

majority of our competitive countries, you would find that we would 

not have the significant disadvantage that we currently have. 

Also, as you look at intellectual property, all those other countries also, in addition to those lower rates, a territorial system, do 

have large R&D incentives. So you need a tax system that is competitive with the rest of the world. Certainly you are not going to 

get a rate or should not try, I do not think, to get a rate to 12 percent because there are a lot of potential problems if you have the 

rate there, because then other countries would just continue to follow it down. We need a rate that is just competitive with the vast 

majority of our competition. 

Senator LANKFORD. OK. So I would tell you just my American attitude screams at me when I say let us try to get down to average. 

I like to win. Right now we are losing because we are at this rate 

that is noncompetitive. But dropping it to average does not seem 

exciting to me. How do we win in this, obviously not trying to shoot 

ourselves in the foot in the process, but to incentivize businesses 

to be able to be here rather than just say if we get to average, 

maybe we will not lose as many. I do not want to just lose as many. 

I want to win. 

Mr. GALVIN. I think if you look at—because taxes are only one 

aspect of the manufacturing, technology, employment issues that 

you have. If you drop the rate further, as we did in 1986, the last 

time, we saw the other countries just brought it down even more. 

So if, for lack of a better term, you want to create a price war, 

which generally—— 

Senator LANKFORD. Which we are already in. 

Mr. GALVIN. Yes, but be competitive at least. You have to match 

prices in the markets that you serve. If you do not, your volume 

goes down tremendously. That is what we are experiencing. If you 

drop it to 12, I do not know how long other countries, which have 

other levers to pull, will not just do the same and you have not accomplished anything. 

Senator LANKFORD. OK. Fair enough. Can I ask about debt financing as well and the strategy and the advantages that foreign 

companies have in trying to compete to buy American businesses 

based on debt financing in that process? Do you have any insight 

on that? 

Mr. GALVIN. Yes. I would say an example is the United States 

has fairly liberal thin cap rules on acquisitions, as I think some of 

the other panelists suggested, that when the companies were acquiring them, they used a lot of debt financing. And as you look 

at other countries as to debt financing in acquisitions, in studying 

the rules, other countries tend to use other instruments besides 

their tax laws to prevent the debt financing. 

When we tried to acquire a company in China, which we did, for $750 million, we were trying to look at some debt financing because 

it generated—this was in 2000—a lot of cash and you could pay it 

off. The tax law would say you could do debt financing, but their 
21 

equity investments and other controls within China said it all had 

to be equity. So we had to put in $750 million of equity. 

If you look at the French tax code, it is fine to have debt financing. But if you look at what they would say are transfer pricing on 

inter-company loans, it precludes it. 

So we have, in my opinion, weak thin cap rules, and for a company—go back to a Missouri company that I am sure Senator 

McCaskill is quite close to, with Anheuser-Busch—and I think, Mr. 

Koch, you have probably heard of that company. The amount of 

debt financing that was used in that transaction was substantially 

significant, and they were able to finance it—— 

Senator MCCASKILL. Just say ‘‘huge.’’ [Laughter.] 

Mr. GALVIN. Yes, it was a huge number. It was a very big number. And what you had then is companies not only—the acquirer 

likes to put all this debt in the United States where you get the 

benefit of a 35-percent tax shield of all the operating profit of Anheuser-Busch. And so it is another case of where—if you are a capitalist around the world, where would you rather have your debt located? In Ireland at 12 percent, in Germany and most of the developed at 25, or in the United States at 35 percent? You would load 

it all into the United States. That is what they do. They acquire 

the companies, and they lever it up. Then when you see also what 

happens, which being familiar in the St. Louis community, the 

amount of job losses that occur are significant. When the U.S. companies are acquired, jobs in the corporate and also manufacturing 

locations, the R&D location, you lose jobs. No one likes that. That 

is what the Tax Code does. 

Senator LANKFORD. OK. Thank you. 

Senator PORTMAN. Senator Johnson. 

Chairman JOHNSON. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. 

I want to pick up on the point you just made, because I make 

a similar point in terms of where do you want to load up your operating profit. If you are a global manufacturer and you want to take 

advantage of what I think we have in terms of global advantages, 

competitor advantages, we are the world’s largest market here in 

the United States, right? I came from a manufacturing background. 

I know manufacturers want to be close to the customers, so that 

is an enormous advantage. Plus we have abundant and relatively 

cheap power. So if you are one of those global manufacturers, you 

want to come manufacture close to the world’s largest customer 

with cheap energy, are you going to site your plant in Toronto at 

15 percent or Detroit at 35 percent? Isn’t that what we are talking 

about? So you are going to want to site your operating profit or locate your profit in low-tax zones, and you are going to put your 

debt in a high-tax zone. Correct. 

Mr. GALVIN. Yes. 

Chairman JOHNSON. I want to talk about the total decision, because we are always talking about a territorial versus a worldwide 

system, which is a problem, traps profit overseas. But then we also 

have tax rates. 

Mr. Koch, you talked about—and I thought it was a very powerful figure—that for every dollar of profit under U.S. ownership, you 

get to keep 62 cents; under foreign ownership, you would keep 72 
22 

cents. So that is a combination, though, of not only a territorial 

system but also tax rates. Correct? 

Mr. KOCH. For us, we keep everything simple. We report every 

dollar of income in the United States. 

Chairman JOHNSON. Right. 

Mr. KOCH. So the territorial thing does not really affect us. 

Chairman JOHNSON. But it affects any other decision here. 

Mr. KOCH. Absolutely. 

Chairman JOHNSON. It is a combination of the two factors. It is 

really difficult to separate both of them out. Is that basically correct? 

Mr. GALVIN. Yes, and I would give you an example, that for 

Emerson, with 58 percent of our sales outside the United States, 

more than 50 percent of our profits are in the United States. And 

if you look at our sales and exports, we export from the United 

States to trade customers and to our internationally owned subsidiaries $1.6 billion more from the U.S. abroad than we export from 

those own subsidiaries back to customers in the United States. So, 

yes, you make other decisions as well. 

Chairman JOHNSON. Mr. Koch, you are largely a family owned 

business still? 

Mr. KOCH. Yes. 

Chairman JOHNSON. What is your ownership in terms of outside? 

Mr. KOCH. We are a publicly traded company, but the publicly 

traded shares are non-voting shares. And then I have about 30 percent economic interest, and that is all the voting shares. 

Chairman JOHNSON. So, again, as an individual, as a patriot, you 

are saying, ‘‘I do not care about the 10 cents. I am going to keep 

the business here, and I will pay that 10 cents on every dollar penalty.’’ 

But I want to go to a public company, and the fiduciary responsibility of a CEO and the board of directors that are reporting to 

shareholders, which are unions and everybody else, and the pressure and, quite honestly, the fiduciary responsibility they cannot 

give up that 10 cents, can they? Mr. Pyott. 

Mr. PYOTT. Yes, exactly. So that is why, U.S. multinationals, as 

we heard, do appropriate tax planning following the rules. And in 

our case, I would say we were maybe just over the middle of the 

pack, where we paid 26 percent worldwide effective tax rate, in our 

case, with 40 percent of our sales being outside the United States. 

And I can certainly say in terms of the locus of decision of where 

to manufacture, clearly for a long period of time, 25 years plus, we 

invested most of our non-U.S. capacity into Ireland because, obviously, a good workforce, well educated, hardworking, and a tax 

rate—and given our kind of business, where, you are selling eye 

drops in a little bottle of 5 or 10 ml., freight costs really do not play 

any role at all. 

Chairman JOHNSON. Now, what Senator McCaskill was saying, 

people that run these large corporations can do the math. But, 

again, they also have that fiduciary responsibility. But it is way 

more than just making a decision or being a patriot. It is about 

being able to compete, correct? If you do not make that decision, 

if you take that 10-cent-per-dollar penalty, or even greater, eventu-
23 

ally you will not be able to compete, and then you will lose jobs. 

Is that basically a correct evaluation? 

Mr. PYOTT. That would be true. In our case, I think we were so 

strong that we were able to overcome the tax disadvantage because 

we had innovated. And, again, when I started, we were a very 

small firm. It was less than $1 billion. And we competed against 

large U.S. multinationals—Pfizer, Merck—and people used to say, 

‘‘How will you survive?’’ Well, happily, we were so focused in eye 

care that both those companies for different reasons left that business, and we were the ones that prevailed and gained market share 

year in, year out. 

Chairman JOHNSON. Well, eventually you were not able to survive as a U.S.-owned company. That is the bottom line. Again, we 

can demonize those individuals that took a look at the Tax Code— 

and, again, if there was insider trading, that is a totally different 

subject. But let us assume there was not. But those—we will call 

them ‘‘corporate raiders’’—they are simply using a Tax Code and 

looking at global tax jurisdictions and saying this is a financial 

transaction that makes a lot of sense, and there was in the end 

nothing you could really do about it, other than find a white 

knight—— 

Mr. PYOTT. Which happened to be a foreign—— 

Chairman JOHNSON. A foreign company, because, again, that is 

the only way they could compete. 

Mr. PYOTT. That is right. 

Chairman JOHNSON. So this is about math, this is about competition. And, again, we can demonize American companies that are 

trying to survive, which is the wrong way of looking at this, or we 

can take a look and, as the Chairman said, point to the real villain, 

which is the Tax Code, which forces this. And, again, if we ignore 

that reality—and that is what I want to get to. The reality of the 

situation is we have an uncompetitive Tax Code, and if U.S. businesses do not respond to that, they will be put out of business because they will not be able to compete. Is that basically a true 

statement, Mr. Galvin. 

Mr. GALVIN. Yes. 

Mr. PYOTT. I would like to follow on to what you really suggested, and that is, companies that are either foreign or have become foreign through the inversion process typically have then 

used that hunting license and that advantage to keep going. And 

there are many examples where the original transaction was, let us 

call it, $10 billion, and 4 or 5 years later, the quantity of deals they 

had done was multiples of that, three, four, or five times. So you 

can see there is a secondary effect here as well. 

Chairman JOHNSON. OK. I will just close, again, by commending 

the Chair and Ranking Member. This is so important. Senator 

Lankford just left. He is in charge of our Subcommittee on Regulation, which is another big problem when you are trying to track 

global capital and keep manufacturing jobs in America. We have 

such an uncompetitive regulatory environment. But as this hearing 

clearly shows, as the work of this Committee staff has done, and 

the Chairman and the Ranking Member have done, we have an uncompetitive tax system forcing companies, in order to survive, to 

take over that corporate ownership, and then we lose it all. We lose 
24 

all the income in terms of being able to tax it. So we have to become far more competitive, and we are highlighting a reality here 

that we have to admit exists. 

Thank you, Mr. Chairman. 

Senator PORTMAN. Senator Ayotte. 

OPENING STATEMENT OF SENATOR AYOTTE 

Senator AYOTTE. I want to thank the Chair. I want to thank the 

witnesses that are here. This is a very important topic. But I kind 

of want to boil this down to a little straight talk on this, because 

I think what we are seeing in the political realm is we have seen 

a lot of discussion about bad corporations who want to commit 

these horrible things called ‘‘inversions.’’ When we think about the 

workforce, the people of this country that want a good-paying job 

in this country, isn’t it those individuals who get impacted the most 

by our failure to take on this Tax Code issue and make sure that 

we are competitive? And I would ask each of you for a yes or no 

answer on that. Mr. Galvin. 

Mr. GALVIN. It is very difficult, how you phrased the question, 

to give a yes or no answer, because there are two types of transactions you proposed or looked at. If you are looking at corporate 

acquisitions from an international company buying a U.S. company, the employment levels I think factually will show you have 

been substantially reduced. I think you can see that very clearly 

in the Anheuser-Busch situation. 

If you look at inversions, we are seeing a lot of inversions, and 

I do not have the numbers in front of me, but I suspect the management generally does not move from the U.S. location where they 

are at. A few people, it is a domiciled location in another country. 

The community involvement in an inversion probably still remains 

very heavily in the U.S. So you have a different impact on an inversion with a management, even though they acquired another 

company and a new company is set up, the legal ownership—and 

there are probably several more lawyers here than I am, but that 

legal ownership is abroad, the management who is running it is 

probably—— 

Senator AYOTTE. I am just trying to boil this down for my constituents to understand. Competitiveness, incredibly important. 

What I get the question from your average person is, OK, I see 

these corporations, the management, the leadership, they are doing 

very well. How do we make sure that the people in this country 

that are struggling, the middle class, that we create greater opportunities for them? And it seems to me that this Tax Code issue 

often gets misrepresented, that somehow if we make our code rate 

more competitive, if we make sure that we have the right types of 

laws to encourage research and development, whether it is a patent 

box or something, ultimately, it is the workforce that is going to 

benefit in terms of opportunity. And that is what I am trying to 

get at, because this is a question I will get out at my town halls 

when it comes to the corporate rate and why should we do this, 

aren’t we giving an advantage, to people that are doing well anyway. And I just want to boil this down so that your average person 

can understand why this is so important. 
25 

Mr. PYOTT. Maybe if I can have a stab at it, if one looks at history around the world—and I am fortunate. I have lived in 10 

countries, worked in 7, so I could tell you the good, bad, and ugly 

of all of them. And if you look, say, at extreme examples like the 

United Kingdom and Sweden in the 1970s, where we had completely uncompetitive taxes, probably uncompetitive labor markets, 

and business just left the country, once that got fixed, a lot of it 

came back. So that is very encouraging that in the same way that 

we are lamenting the current situation, if we can get it right, even 

if we were average, things would be a lot better. 

I would also like to give you an example of creation of jobs. In 

my testimony I was talking about the huge investment in R&D. In 

my 17 years, I started with an investment of $100 million a year 

in R&D, and the last year was well over $1 billion. A large part 

of that was you need people to do that. You need highly educated 

people. Eighty percent, maybe 85 percent of those people were in 

the United States. They were not in the United Kingdom, France, 

Switzerland, or Singapore. They were in the United States. And, 

hence, why when my explanation of what occurred, the plan to 

really kill R&D, which is just factual, by Valeant to reduce the 

R&D spend from $1 billion down to $200 million-plus, you can 

work it out what would have happened. And I stated thank goodness the best answer I could get was the merger with Actavis, who 

at the margin is reducing R&D probably 12, 15 percent, again, not 

my desire, but we are all pragmatists. It was the best we could do. 

And it was the right thing for the future company and its stockholders. 

Senator AYOTTE. Mr. Koch. 

Mr. KOCH. Yes, I would add to what the other panelists have 

said. There is something different about American ownership of a 

company. I mean, you live in the community. You do not want to 

see in the paper that you just cut 1,000 jobs. 

Senator AYOTTE. Right. 

Mr. KOCH. But if you live in a foreign country and you fly in and 

you whack all those jobs, there is no remorse. But as an Americanowned company, the people I employ, their kid, my wife may coach 

them on the soccer team, you see them at a—I mean, these are people you went to school with back in Cincinnati. It is important to 

provide a livelihood for those people, and you cannot get away from 

the personal commitment and desire to continue that comes from 

having the decisionmakers here in the United States in that community. 

Senator AYOTTE. Well, I appreciate all of you being here. I think 

that you have given us a very obvious list of things we need to do. 

And this is something that we have been talking about a lot here 

collectively in the Congress for too long, because it is obvious what 

we need to do in terms of the tax rate, in terms of competition, in 

terms of making sure that this is the best place in the world to own 

a great American company that produces some really good beer. 

And so I think that we, I hope that this is something we can 

work together across party lines on because it will help make sure 

that the 21st Century is an American century when it comes to 

American jobs. So I thank you all for being here. 

Senator PORTMAN. Thank you, Senator Ayotte. 
26 

We are now into our second round of questions. We will try to 

keep these to 5 minutes for each of us. Many of the questions that 

you all have answers I think have shed light on this issue of how 

do you come up with a better tax system. We talked about the rate. 

We talked about the international system, territorial system, enabling countries to repatriate their profits, the U.S. system currently 

locking out those profits. 

But on the jobs front, I am just curious. Mr. Galvin, I said I was 

not going to let you off the hook. I have some questions for you as 

well. You talked a little bit about Schneider outbidding you for 

APC, and this is in this category I talked about earlier where it is 

not just about U.S. companies getting taken over by foreign companies. It is about U.S. companies not being able to be as successful 

as they could be because when they try to grow, they are constrained because foreign entities can pay a higher price for that 

company because of their after-tax profits being better. They can 

pay a premium. And I think what you said was that this was an 

example. 

So here is my second question, though, about APC. Do you know 

what happened to APC? They were taken over by Schneider. What 

happened to their U.S. job totals? 

Mr. GALVIN. They went down substantially in Rhode Island, and 

a lot of the R&D was consolidated and leveraged in the French operations, which when you have an acquisition, there generally is a 

lot of leverage on that business. 

We would have also reduced the Rhode Island employment, but 

we would have substantially moved those jobs to Columbus, Ohio, 

where we still own Liebert Corporation, which makes three-phase 

UPSs as opposed to single-phase and would have kept the workforce in the United States. 

We both had a substantial share already in the UPS business, 

and we could both get substantial operational synergies in serving 

the world market. It would have been just us, would have moved 

it to a U.S. location, which is often where we have our centralized 

investments, so we still employ a lot of people in Ohio, as you 

know. 

Senator PORTMAN. Now you have really piqued my interest by 

mentioning Ohio. 

Mr. GALVIN. I thought I would. 

Senator PORTMAN. We are part of this puzzle. 

Senator MCCASKILL. That was convenient. 

Senator PORTMAN. Thank you. [Laughter.] 

So here we have a situation where you are trying to buy up companies so you can expand and grow your U.S. company. You lose 

out on the acquisition because of a foreign company can pay a higher price because they can pay a premium. They buy the company. 

This is a U.S. company that you wanted to buy. They do the smart 

tax planning, which is to take intellectual property, R&D, take it 

overseas, and the French do have a lower rate, and they have the 

ability to take advantage of that. They, therefore, take jobs out as 

well. David Pyott talked earlier about how R&D and jobs go together, and increasingly that is the case. I do not know, we have 

not really talked about the OECD Base Erosion and Profit Shifting 

(BEPS) project, but basically that is encouraging countries to go 
27 

ahead and say not only do we have a patent box, but we have a 

nexus where you have to have the actual business activity connected with it, meaning people. 

So we lose jobs. You cannot expand, including in Columbus, 

Ohio, thank you. But it is almost a secondary cause that I think 

we do not focus on enough here, is that it is not just about U.S. 

companies being taken over. It is about U.S. companies not being 

able to be competitive. And this does go to salaries and wages and 

benefits, because that is who, in the end, bears the brunt of this, 

is the American worker. So thank you for your work on this project 

of tax reform over the years, Mr. Galvin, and we look forward to 

working with you going forward on trying to come up with a bipartisan approach that is sensible. Perhaps even in the next few 

months we can make progress on that. 

Back to Mr. Pyott for a second with regard to this intellectual 

property issue. You talked about the fact that other countries are 

putting in place these patent boxes where they may have a lower 

rate than us but they have a substantially lower rate than us with 

regard to intellectual property that is often a patent or a copyright, 

and they define these differently. Senator McCaskill raised the 

good question earlier about a challenge for us as we look at patent 

boxes, and as you know, that is something that Senator Schumer 

and I recommended in our report a few weeks ago, is, what kind 

of intellectual property do you include? Obviously, you have a lot 

of experience with regard to the R&D side, on the pharma side, 

and with regard to patents. But do you have some thoughts for us 

with regard to if the United States were to go to a patent box, how 

broad the definition of innovation should be? 

Mr. PYOTT. Yes, I think that is where you really get down into 

the real nitty-gritty details, and I think to answer on a high level, 

first of all, as I said earlier in my testimony, you can overcome a 

couple of hundred basis points of overall rate by making those 

kinds of tools available. In our case, as I was explaining, we often 

chose to think very carefully about where we would locate our intellectual property, understanding on the long swing we had a final 

good answer. But, of course, on the short swing, we were paying 

a lot more—it was costing more because we did not have the full 

35-percent reduction. So that was a balancing act. 

Senator PORTMAN. The deduction you would have had in the 

United States versus the—— 

Mr. PYOTT. If we had kept the intellectual property here. 

Senator PORTMAN. Right. But the value of that IP grows as your 

drug may be successful. 

Mr. PYOTT. That is right. 

Senator PORTMAN. And, therefore, it is worth having it overseas. 

Mr. PYOTT. Yes. I think also another one for us—and that gets 

back to the nexus you made between patent box and where the 

R&D actually gets done, let us use that word, where the real people sit, the real expenses are, because there, thank goodness, we 

still have a huge inherent advantage. We located most of our R&D 

in California, not just out of emotional love, but that is where the 

real knowledge was. And even in the United Kingdom, where we 

located our operation, there was access to the kind of people we 

needed, but let us say the real emphasis remained the United 
28 

States. And had we moved forward another 10 years the same way, 

I think it would have still stayed the same rough balance. 

Senator PORTMAN. The final question I have is just briefly with 

regard to this inter-company lending. So what you told us this 

morning is not only does the rate matter, not only does the territorial system matter, but also that these foreign companies have an 

advantage because when they buy a U.S. company, they can load 

up debt in the United States, take advantage of the 35-percent rate 

and the deduction you get. 

So this is something, obviously, that is a concern as you are looking at tax reform, and, Mr. Galvin, you have, I am sure, looked into 

this quite a bit. But one of the challenges that we have right now 

as we look at how do we come up with a new system is to try to 

avoid some of—the BEPS project gets into this, of course—some of 

the base erosion that might occur through inter-company debt. Can 

you talk about what you think might be the right answer to that? 

Mr. GALVIN. Well, certainly a benefit in lowering the rate to 25 

percent and having it competitive with the rest of the world would 

substantially reduce the incentive to load the debt in the United 

States. 

Senator PORTMAN. Probably the best base erosion we could do is 

lowering the rate. 

Mr. GALVIN. Yes, lower the rate, and they are not going to load 

up—if it is the same rate in Germany, France, Switzerland, whatever, you do not have the same incentive. You are incentivizing 

them economically to put the debt in the United States. 

Senator PORTMAN. Senator McCaskill. 

Senator MCCASKILL. So here is my worry about us really getting 

serious about redoing this Tax Code. I have had the pleasure or the 

horror of sitting in on some complicated tax planning meetings 

with some of the foremost tax experts in the country, and it is 

frightening. It is frightening because, for everything we do in the 

Tax Code, it is an action we take, but then there is a reaction. So 

you cannot just say, OK, we are going to do 25 percent and then 

let it go. We have to do all of the other stuff. I mean, if you just 

look at the interplay between estate taxes and trusts, for example, 

and all of the things that good tax planners can do around those 

two things, that is just one example of thousands that are in the 

Tax Code. 

So I would certainly ask all of you, those of you who have had 

real-world experience with complex financial, international transactions, to be all hands on deck helping us here so that we can look 

around corners. 

What we just talked about in terms of the patent box, if we do 

something like a patent box, do we require, for example, Mr. Pyott, 

that in order to take advantage of the patent box, you must do the 

R&D in the same country? In other words, if you are going to get 

the patent deal here, you cannot just have the IP located here; you 

have to do all the R&D here, too. Is that a good idea? Is that a 

bad idea? Are we going to have a reaction that is not good there? 

What is your opinion on that? 

Mr. PYOTT. I think that would be very sound for the United 

States given our strength in R&D and our whole background of 

huge investment in the NIH, which is a national jewel, as well as 
29 

all the benefits that then spill into startup companies, universities 

and so on. That takes decades to replicate. 

And if I were hypothetically, in the U.S. Government, I would 

say make that an item of trade negotiation as well, to say to our 

partners in the OECD, ‘‘Fine, we are good with your patent boxes, 

but you have to have a level playing field,’’ i.e., make the nexus, 

the expenses, the people have to be where the patent—— 

Senator MCCASKILL. Require the nexus for them also as part of 

trade. 

Mr. PYOTT. That is what I would say. 

I will give you another example in the discussion that we did not 

touch upon, and that was the Treasury regulation that was put out 

last September to tighten up the rules on so-called hopscotching of 

foreign-located cash. And, again, I think that was a useful measure, but as I said in pretty much all my testimony, these are things 

that are at the edge. But if you get them all right in the cumulation, then it will be really quite good. Or I think with Mr. Galvin, 

when I was listening to you, if you have rules about how much debt 

can you put down, to prevent, let us call it, certain limits being exceeded, those are all things—if you just get them, like 10 of those 

things broadly right, then you have probably got the whole thing 

broadly right. 

Senator MCCASKILL. I was interested to hear you say that your 

R&D went to California, and the reason that interested me is because around here California by some of my colleagues would be 

considered the worst place for a business to go because all the regulation in California and the taxes are so high and the regulation 

is so awful. So the magnet was, in fact, the higher education community and the knowledge base that is in California? 

Mr. PYOTT. That is still our inherent advantage. Now, to be fair, 

the company was founded in California in 1950, started in L.A., 

went down to Irvine before the city even existed. I celebrated with 

the mayor 2 years ago, 50 years of Irvine, and I pointed out, ‘‘We 

were here before you were,’’ which was kind of fun. 

But the real point that you make, I totally agree with you. It is 

the basis of people that are being produced by the UC system, 

CSU, which we need to, by the way, pay attention to because funding is disappearing from the University of California, and then all 

the startup companies. It is a whole fabric, a tapestry of people, 

venture capitalists, that is very difficult to replicate. And, you see 

it happening in other areas of the United States, but, really when 

you step back, you can say the biotech industry is really Northern 

even more than Southern California, more San Diego than Orange 

County. It is the Boston area, a little bit in Maryland. And then 

the device industry is very much Boston, Minnesota, and California. 

I mean, there are notable exceptions, but those are the real clusters. And, if anything, I see people moving more to the clusters 

than moving away from them despite cost. 

Senator MCCASKILL. So I think the point I am trying to make 

here is it is just not as simple as the number. The math matters 

and being competitive matters. I could not agree more. But if we 

in the effort to lower the corporate tax rate erode our revenues we 

have done NIH on the cheap ever since the crisis. NIH has been 
30 

struggling. Government shutdowns are brutal to NIH because of 

the inability to have certainty in terms of funding research, which 

you cannot do in fits and starts and do it effectively, certainly not 

cost-effectively. 

So I just want to make the point, I think the hardest thing for 

us on tax reform is the partisan divide that we have, that we try 

to navigate around. And the Chairman and I are, I hope, part of 

a group that is working very hard to tear that down. But I think 

it is important for the business community to continue to stress 

that higher education in this country, funding of NIH, the ability 

of our kids to afford college, that all of these are just as important 

for our global competitiveness as the number that we stick in the 

Tax Code. And I hope that all of you will help us with that, and 

particularly, Mr. Galvin, I know your leadership role in BRT and 

the business leaders. It would be a shame if we would, have a race 

to the bottom on what is our inherent strength in a foolish race to 

be the lowest tax rate in the world. 

Thank you, Mr. Chairman. 

Senator PORTMAN. I thank the Ranking Member, Senator 

McCaskill, and I just have to say the Joint Tax Committee in 2013 

did a great analysis, saying if you get the rate down to 25 percent, 

you actually get more revenue because you have more economic activity. And that is the goal, obviously, that all of us have, is to 

bring these jobs and investment back and to generate more opportunity here. 

Gentlemen, thank you very much for your testimony this morning. We will now call the second panel. Thank you for being here. 

[Pause.] 

Senator PORTMAN. OK. We will call our second round of witnesses now for this morning’s hearing, and I want to start by 

thanking both Mr. Schiller and Mr. Kobza for being here. And I 

also want to thank them for their cooperation and their companies’ 

cooperation with the Subcommittee. They voluntarily provided very 

important information that helps us to get to the bottom of what 

we are after here, which is better tax policy. And I appreciate their 

willingness to do that. 

I also want to repeat what I said earlier today, which is that we 

are talking here about the U.S. Tax Code being the problem. OK? 

And I hope that is something that every person watching or listening today understands. This is about a problem here in Washington, D.C., which is a Tax Code that is dysfunctional. It is not 

serving American workers. It is antiquated, it is outdated, and it 

has to be more competitive. 

Mr. Schiller served as Valeant Pharmaceuticals’ chief financial 

officer between December 2011 and June 2015; therefore, he has a 

lot of experience and background that will be helpful to us. 

Joshua Kobza is the chief financial officer of Restaurant Brands 

International, which is the parent company of Burger King and 

Tim Hortons, the Canadian restaurant chain. 

I appreciate, again, both of you being here this morning and look 

forward to your testimony. We do have a time system, which we 

talked about earlier. We would ask that you try to limit your oral 

testimony to 5 minutes. Of course, all of your written testimony 
31 

1The prepared statement of Mr. Schiller appears in the Appendix on page 57. 

will be printed in the record, and we look forward to the opportunity to ask some questions afterwards. Mr. Schiller. 

TESTIMONY OF HOWARD B. SCHILLER,1 CHIEF FINANCIAL OFFICER (DECEMBER 2011–JUNE 2015), AND BOARD OF DIRECTORS (SEPTEMBER 2012–PRESENT), VALEANT PHARMACEUTICALS INTERNATIONAL, INC. 

Mr. SCHILLER. Chairman Portman, Ranking Member McCaskill, 

and Members of the Subcommittee, thank you for the opportunity 

to appear before you on behalf of Valeant Pharmaceuticals. 

Valeant is a multinational specialty pharmaceutical and medical 

device company. We operate in over 100 countries with approximately 45 percent of our revenue in 2014 coming from outside the 

United States, with a particular focus on growing emerging markets. 

For the past 7 years, Valeant has employed and successfully executed on a unique and differentiated business strategy within the 

pharmaceutical industry. Today’s Valeant was born of the 2010 

combination of Biovail, a Canadian corporation, and Valeant, a 

Delaware corporation. At the time, each of Valeant and Biovail 

were small pharmaceutical companies focusing on many of the 

same therapeutic areas and geographies, with the need for greater 

scale to compete against larger multinational pharmaceutical companies. This was a merger of equals in which Biovail acquired 

Valeant. Today we are headquartered in Laval, Quebec, and have 

approximately 19,500 employees, approximately 5,700 of whom are 

based in the United States. 

Over the past 5 years, our sales and market capitalization have 

each grown tenfold to projected 2015 sales of approximately $11 

billion and a market capitalization of approximately $87 billion. 

With this growth, we have been able to expand our operations both 

here in the United States and around the world, creating quality 

jobs in the markets in which we operate. 

The growth and success we have been able to achieve at Valeant 

is rooted, we believe, in the values and core principles that guide 

our business decisions. These include: 

First, a commitment to the health and safety of the patients and 

customers who use and rely on our products. 

Second, a commitment to innovation through an output-driven 

R&D approach, which is unique in our industry. We focus less on 

how much we spend on R&D and more on what we get out of our 

R&D efforts. We source innovation through internal efforts, 

through licensing technologies from entrepreneurs and other third 

parties, and through acquisitions. We believe the results of this approach speak for themselves, with 20 product launches in the 

United States alone last year and a rich pipeline of products. 

Third, a commitment to our decentralized business model under 

which each business unit is given control over and held accountable 

for results within that unit. 

Fourth, we are committed to a disciplined approach to business 

development with a focus on high rates of return and rapid pay-
32 

back periods for our shareholders. I would like to address that last 

principle in greater detail. 

First and foremost, we only pursue transactions that make strategic business sense for Valeant. We generally look for businesses 

to complement our existing product portfolio and/or match our 

focus on high-growth therapeutic areas of geographies where we 

believe we can improve business operations. We have a strong 

track record of deploying our management and business strategy to 

grow and improve businesses we acquire and provide superior returns to our stakeholders. 

Second, we take a financially disciplined approach to business 

development. When assessing acquisition opportunities, we generally seek to achieve at least a 20-percent internal rate of return 

and a payback period of 6 years or less based on applying statutory 

tax rates to the projected future earnings of potential targets. Of 

course, these are guidelines, not hard-and-fast rules, and every acquisition involves a significant element of judgment. In particular, 

as we have previously stated in public statements to our shareholders, with respect to large public company acquisitions, due to 

the transparency of the public markets and other factors, we have 

generally accepted rates of return below our stated targets based 

on our ability to deploy large amounts of capital at returns still significantly in excess of our cost of capital. 

We do not value proposed transactions and do not decide whether 

or at what price to acquire a business based on the availability to 

achieve tax synergies. We do, however, enjoy a lower overall tax 

rate which allows us to generate more cash-flow for a given dollar 

of revenue and leaves us with more capital to deploy in our business, which in turn allows us to deliver higher returns to our 

shareholders and accelerate our growth. 

Ultimately, while the tax synergies we have been able to achieve 

have certainly helped us deliver value to our shareholders, we believe that the execution of our differentiated business model has 

been the primary source of our growth and success. Our financial 

guidelines have helped us to stay disciplined in our acquisitions 

strategy, and as our Chairman and CEO indicated last week in an 

earning calls reviewing past deals, we are exceeding our expectations with respect to our acquisitions overall. 

You have also inquired about our views regarding U.S. tax reform. I am not a tax expert and cannot speak to the specifics of 

any particular aspects of tax reform, but we have found the Canadian system to be very conducive to our growth and success. I 

would be happy to elaborate on that further during Q&A. 

Thank you again for the opportunity to appear before the Subcommittee, and I would be pleased to answer questions regarding 

these topics. 

Senator PORTMAN. Thank you. Mr. Kobza. 
33 

1The prepared statement of Mr. Kobza appears in the Appendix on page 70. 

TESTIMONY OF JOSHUA KOBZA,1 CHIEF FINANCIAL OFFICER, 

RESTAURANT BRANDS INTERNATIONAL 

Mr. KOBZA. Thank you. Chairman Portman, Ranking Member 

McCaskill, and Members of the Subcommittee, thank you for the 

opportunity to appear before this Committee. My name is Josh 

Kobza. I am Chief Financial Officer of Restaurant Brands International (RBI) and most recently worked in the same capacity at 

Burger King Worldwide. I am here today to discuss the recent 

Burger King-Tim Hortons transaction, which created one of the 

world’s largest ‘‘quick service restaurant (QSR),’’ chains. I understand that the Committee is reviewing the tax effect of the corporate Tax Code on U.S. businesses and on cross-border mergers 

and acquisitions. While this transaction, like all cross-border combinations, had certain tax implications, the marriage of these two 

iconic brands of similar size under the RBI umbrella was motivated 

by compelling business reasons rather than tax strategies. 

Our vision centered on combining two brands that occupy a distinct space in the QSR landscape—both geographically and in their 

menu offerings—to create new opportunities. Burger King is the 

world’s second largest fast food hamburger restaurant, with over 

14,000 restaurants in approximately 100 countries and U.S. territories. 

Tim Hortons is the largest Canadian-based QSR, with approximately 45 percent of all QSR traffic in Canada. 

Our new RBI family now includes over 19,000 restaurants in approximately 100 countries. More than half of Burger King’s restaurants are located outside the United States, and we see a significant opportunity to grow the Tim Hortons brand and unique operating model in attractive markets all around the world, beginning in the United States. 

My testimony today focuses on this transaction as it occurred 

rather than hypothetical scenarios that could have any number of 

potential inputs and points of analysis. 

In 2013, our management team began to evaluate future alternatives for growth and enhancement of shareholder value, including potential strategic transactions. Through our search, we identified Tim Hortons as an excellent choice—a very high quality business with an incredibly strong brand and complementary menu offerings, where we could add significant value by leveraging Burger 

King’s worldwide operating partner networks and experience in 

global development. 

We structured the transaction in a way that honors the history 

of both companies. Burger King’s headquarters remains in Miami, 

Florida, and Tim Hortons’ remains in Oakville, Ontario, with separate management to ensure the integrity of each brand. 

We plan to open hundreds of new Tim Hortons restaurants 

across the United States, attracting tens of millions of dollars in investment, creating thousands of new jobs, and expanding the U.S. 

tax base. 

As CFO during discussions between Burger King and Tim Hortons, I was responsible for working with our professional advisers 

to explore how to structure a potential transaction. As these discus-
34 

sions progressed, it became clear that a combined Burger King-Tim 

Hortons company should be domiciled in Canada. 

The business case for this transaction was always very clear to 

us, and closing the deal required careful calibration of the terms 

and structure of the transaction. Both the Tim Hortons brand and 

the Burger King brand are revered institutions in their country of 

origin. But given that Canada is the country with the highest concentration of employees, assets, and income for the combined company, Canada was the logical choice to be the domicile of the newly 

formed entity. 

Additionally, the Board of Directors for Tim Hortons at first declined to discuss any possible combination and was reluctant to engage in serious negotiations until our proposal contained both a 

higher price and a commitment to locating the combined company 

in Canada. Throughout our discussions with the company’s board 

and management, it was made clear to us that domiciling the company in Canada was critical to concluding a deal. 

Under the transaction, Burger King remains a U.S. taxpayer 

with an unwavering commitment to our Miami headquarters, the 

surrounding community, and our U.S. franchisees. When compared 

to the 26-percent effective tax rate paid by Burger King prior to the 

transaction, our current effective tax rate is only slightly lower— 

in the range of 3-percent reduction. This modest impact underscores a crucial point: Joining Burger King and Tim Hortons together was fundamentally about growth. Tax considerations were 

never the driving force for our transaction. Rather, our primary 

motivation was to realize the greater business potential of combining these two iconic and complementary brands. 

That is not to say that the domiciling of the company in Canada 

did not have any tax effects. Canada’s tax regime provided both 

slightly better rates and its quasi-territorial system provided an efficient and attractive platform for growth. As a combined company, 

we are focused on accelerating our growth. Our goal is to grow our 

business and our brands alongside our franchisees, employees, and 

other partners. 

In closing, we understand that in recent years, the policy discussion regarding the role of tax considerations in corporate mergers 

and acquisitions has become more prevalent. In this regard, we 

welcome the ongoing bipartisan efforts to make the U.S. tax system 

more competitive to level the playing field. 

Again, thank you for the opportunity to appear before this Committee. I look forward to answering your questions. 

Senator PORTMAN. Thank you both very much. 

I am going to start with you, Mr. Kobza, and Burger King. You 

just made a point that the territorial system in Canada helped 

with growth, that you have a slightly better rate in Canada. The 

information you provided us with regard to your decision-making 

was interesting to me, in part because of what you said about the 

difficulty of bringing your profits back to the United States. You all 

were growing internationally. You wanted to grow more, and that 

is a good thing. But you found that it was hard to bring those rates 

back. 

Could you turn to page 29 of the appendix? I think you have that 

in front of you there. 
35 

Talk to us a little about this. Is it accurate to say that at the 

time of the transaction you expected a lot of your future growth to 

come from international expansion? 

Mr. KOBZA. So prior to the transaction, we had gone through 4 

years of rapidly accelerating development around the world. I think 

one of the great accomplishments of those 4 years was to multiply 

the pace of our growth by about four times in terms of net new restaurants. 

Senator PORTMAN. So you were looking to grow more internationally. So here you are, a U.S. company wanting to grow internationally. And what were you facing internationally? You had, again, 

looking at the data you provided us, about $700 million locked out 

in foreign earnings, meaning earnings you could not bring back to 

the United States without paying a high tax rate. Is that accurate? 

Mr. KOBZA. It is accurate that we had about $700 million of permanently reinvested earnings, and we had made the decision prior 

to the transaction that we would reinvest those permanently, 

whether that be through new investments in our growth or through 

M&A, or investments in our joint ventures. 

Senator PORTMAN. And what were you telling your board that 

your corporate rate would be if you brought those cash balances 

you had overseas, that $700 million, back to the United States of 

America? What was your tax rate you talked about? If you look at 

the appendix, there is a number there. 

Mr. KOBZA. Yes, I think it is very helpful to look at page 10 of 

the appendix, and I think it is very important to bring some context to this page. This is really fundamentally the lens that we look 

through when we analyzed the merger with Tim Hortons. And 

what you have on the left side of the page is our base case outlook, 

which considered our strategic plan for the existing Burger King 

business and our existing tax rate, which was around 28, 29 percent. And we thought that with that plan we could generate a 

share price of about $46 over the course of the next few years. 

So when we measured the incremental value that this merger 

would add, we always looked at it versus that $46 per share. So 

we looked at how much more value could we add by doing the 

merger. 

Senator PORTMAN. Let me just focus you in on this one issue, 

though, that we are getting at, and I appreciate your comment earlier that you hope we could see a U.S. Tax Code that was a more 

level playing field. You had $700 million overseas. You were telling 

folks that under the corporate structure of being a U.S. company, 

if you brought that back, it would be a very high rate. In fact, I 

think you said it would likely increase to near 40 percent would be 

your corporate tax rate if you were to repatriate those cash balances. Is that correct? 

Mr. KOBZA. The reason for that analysis was that when we 

looked at a Canadian-domiciled company, we considered that given 

the quasi-territorial system, we would likely distribute all of our 

foreign earnings. So as an illustrative analysis, we calculated at a 

very high level what the tax impact would be if we were to distribute all of our earnings in the existing case, and we used an illustrative rate of 40 percent, and that is the value that you see 

on—— 
36 

Senator PORTMAN. I get it. And that is sort of the point, in part, 

of this hearing, to say here you were a U.S. company and saying 

you would like to have the flexibility to be able to bring some of 

those profits back and reinvest here and expand, and you probably 

also thought this is going to get worse because you wanted to grow 

more internationally and, therefore, have more of those earnings 

that would get into this lockout. So, there was a tax barrier. 

The other issue is how did you choose Canada as your headquarters, and let me preface this by saying I do not question what 

you are saying at all about the business reasons to have the combination. I think, from everything I have read and heard about it, 

that is what motivated you looking at Tim Hortons in the first 

place, and it sounds like it is working for you from a business perspective. 

But you had a decision to make. Where is the headquarters going 

to be? And my understanding is that—and, again, I think this is— 

if you look at page 25 of the appendix, you will see something with 

regard to this decisionmaking as to where the headquarters ought 

to be. You looked at a number of different places. I do not see the 

United States of America on the list. And I assume, based on the 

information that you provided us, that that was because of the tax 

consequences. 

So I get it that Tim Hortons wanted to stay in Canada. I am sure 

they had lots of reasons for that, maybe some of which had nothing 

to do with taxes, but certainly one would be taxes. Is it accurate 

to say that the United States was not even on the list of places 

where you might want to put a corporate headquarters of the combined companies? 

Mr. KOBZA. Yes, so as we went through the transaction, I would 

say there are probably three big factors that drove our decisionmaking about why the combined company should be domiciled in 

Canada. 

First, Canada would be the center of operations for the combined 

company. It had the largest concentration of employees, assets, and 

income of the company. 

And the second reason is that this was something extremely important to the board of directors and management team of Tim 

Hortons. And, in fact, in written communications to us, it was put 

out as a condition to moving forward and even beginning to negotiate in the deal. It was only after we put that in our offer letter 

that the company even began to negotiate with us. 

Furthermore, we had to count on getting approval from the Canadian Government under the Investment Canada Act (ICA), and 

we went through a study of all 1,500 cases that have passed 

through ICA review in the past 25 years and through that study 

came to the conclusion that domiciling the combined company in 

Canada would be a critical success factor for getting through that 

approval process. And we did not have any exit from the merger 

agreement if we did not get approval, except under extreme circumstances and in which case we would have had to pay a $500 

million penalty. So those three factors were very strong factors in 

driving us to consider Canada. 

That said, we also looked at the tax effects of domiciling the company in Canada, and as you can see from the materials, there was 
37 

a reduction in the tax rate relative to the tax rate that Burger King 

was paying previously, and that is something that was factored 

into our analysis, into our board’s analysis of the deal as a whole. 

Senator PORTMAN. One final one is just with regard to, again, 

page 25 of the appendix. The slide seems to be saying that Burger 

King moving offshore would reduce your tax rate to the low 20s 

and avoid this 40-percent effective rate we talked about if you had 

had to bring your earnings back from overseas. And you say here 

that the incremental value creation from tax savings would be $1.4 

billion without repatriated earnings and $5.5 billion if you did repatriate. So assuming repatriation, which your presentation does, 

was it your estimate at the time that placing the combined company headquarters in the United States would have destroyed 

about $5.5 billion of value? 

Mr. KOBZA. So the $5.5 billion calculation was a very simplistic, 

high-level, and illustrative calculation that applied that rate to the 

combined company. Because of the fact that we only ever looked indepth and explored with our advisers in-depth the tax structuring 

among other structuring considerations of a transaction moving to 

Canada, we never looked in-depth at fully examining the impacts 

of domiciling the company in the United States 

Senator PORTMAN. So it is an estimate. 

Mr. KOBZA. It is a very high level estimate. 

Senator PORTMAN. But a significant one; $5.5 billion in a transaction of this size obviously played a huge role. 

So, look, thank you again for your willingness to provide information. We appreciate the fact that the information you provided us 

is helping us to come up with, as you said earlier, a better tax system. 

And with that, I will turn to my colleague, and I look forward 

to following up with questions in a moment. Senator McCaskill. 

Senator MCCASKILL. Thank you. 

Mr. Schiller, there was a press release at the time that you were 

fighting for Allergan from Allergan about your tax strategies being 

more aggressive than many of your peers’ within the pharmaceutical industry. In 2014, the CEO, Michael Pearson, stated, and 

I am quoting: ‘‘We were able to get a corporate tax structure which 

took our effective tax from 36 percent overall to one that was actually 3.1 percent, which we hoped to continue to work on and move 

lower.’’ 

Do you understand how that infuriates Americans? I mean, I get 

it that it is the math, and I get it that it is legal. But you understand the notion that a corporation as large as yours that—and I 

think you said in your testimony the majority of your sales are to 

Americans? The majority of your profits are from Americans? That 

you believe you can figure out a way to pay less than 3.1 percent 

in taxes when most Americans are going, ‘‘What is up with that? 

How did we get to that situation?’’ 

How much lower do you think you could get the rate than 3.1 

percent? Nothing? I mean, do you believe that you have an opportunity to get—are there ways you are strategizing that you can— 

is your rate at 3.1 now, your overall rate? 

Mr. SCHILLER. No. Our rate right now is around 4 percent. 
38 

Senator MCCASKILL. It is at 4, OK. Well, let me ask you this: 

What percentage of the profit that you are generating in Valeant 

comes from Medicare? 

Mr. SCHILLER. We have a very small percentage of our profits— 

I believe—of our revenue. I believe it is around 5 percent or so that 

is government, either Medicaid or Medicare. 

Senator MCCASKILL. OK. Well, let us talk about Isuprel. It is a 

drug to treat cardiac arrest, so I am assuming that a large number 

of the people who would take this drug would be over 65. 

Mr. SCHILLER. Yes. 

Senator MCCASKILL. In 2013, a company called Hospira sold 

Isuprel to Marathon Pharmaceutical, which increased the price 

from $44.50 per vial to $215 per vial. Do you know how much 

Isuprel is paid for by Medicare in the United States? 

Mr. SCHILLER. I do not know specifically. 

Senator MCCASKILL. Well, I would really appreciate if you all 

could get us those numbers for Isuprel, because in February of this 

year, you purchased Isuprel. And according to the Wall Street 

Journal, the price went—now, remember, it was $44 a vial in 2013. 

The price went to $1,346 per vial. This is an increase of more than 

500 percent after you purchased the drug. And the only thing that 

has changed is the label. 

So I am trying to figure out how we reconcile this is a drug that 

I guarantee you I would be shocked if the majority of the people 

taking that drug are not on Medicare—how we reconcile fixing the 

Tax Code so that it is fairer because I do not want to demonize you 

for using business practices that we allow you to use in our country, but there is something way out of whack here. What accounts 

for a 500-percent increase in a vial of a drug where the R&D has 

already been done and the price had already been raised from fivefold immediately before your acquisition of the drug? How can you 

do that? Because there is no competition for the drug? 

Mr. SCHILLER. Well, first and foremost is ensuring that our patients have the drugs they need and they are safe and they are efficacious. This drug that you are talking about is a hospital-based 

drug. It is part of a protocol. Any patient that needs it is getting 

it. 

The analysis on pricing for a drug, as you can imagine, is quite 

complex. There was work being done by the prior owner before we 

bought it, looking at the benefits of this drug to the system, to patients, to hospitals, and the conclusion was that it was significantly 

underpriced. When we closed on the transaction, we continued that 

work and took the pricing actions that you acknowledged. 

I would add, though, however, this is one out of thousands of 

products that we have. The vast majority of our revenue in the 

United States is governed by contracts with managed care, et 

cetera, where their price increases are stipulated in contracts and, 

we do not have free pricing—free ability to raise prices like that. 

These are anomalies. And, a lot of it is driven—but just that, the 

vast majority of the drugs, price increases are not anywhere close 

to that. 

Senator MCCASKILL. I would love to pull back the curtain and 

figure out how you price that. I would love to figure out how you 
39 

did that. I would love to understand how it goes from 215 per— 

you did not change the drug. The drug is the same, right? 

Mr. SCHILLER. It is. 

Senator MCCASKILL. The protocol is the same, right? 

Mr. SCHILLER. It is. 

Senator MCCASKILL. I mean, I would love to figure out the formula. I mean, why not $2,500 per vial? Why not $3,000 per vial? 

I mean, how in the world did you figure out that it was underpriced? Because there is not a generic competitor, which I do not 

get. I bet there will be soon if you are getting $1,300 a vial for it. 

It is a mystery to me how that number came about. And maybe 

you want to submit how that came about, because I will be shocked 

if the American taxpayers are not paying the majority of that, because if it is hospital-based, and they are over 65, it is all Medicare, because it is not something anybody is getting—it is not Part 

D, right? 

Mr. SCHILLER. No, it would be part of the protocol, so it is a fixed 

price for a procedure. So the procedure would not cost anything 

more because the price of a drug went up. 

Senator MCCASKILL. It is not the subject matter of this hearing, 

but I got distracted when I saw that. I apologize to the Chairman 

that it is not the subject, but it should be. We should do one on 

this, how we figure out these drugs going from—and it is happening all over the place in the pharmaceutical industry where 

drugs are just magically—we are having these mergers, and then 

all of a sudden drugs are going from 50 bucks to 250 bucks, or they 

are going from 500 bucks to 2,000 bucks after a merger and acquisition. And I cannot figure out why. And it is really problematic. 

Hopefully on the next round I can get to something that is more 

topic-based, but I could not resist. 

Thank you, Mr. Chairman. 

Senator PORTMAN. Thank you, Senator McCaskill. 

I have some questions with regard to the portrayal you gave us 

in terms of the tax advantages of both your initial decision to 

merge, and just as background you talked about this Valeant U.S.- 

headquartered company had a reported tax rate around 35 percent, 

teams up with a Canadian pharma firm called Biovail, kind of a 

merger of equals, would you say? Biovail had its headquarters in 

Canada, obviously, a territorial system there we talked about 

which gives them certain advantages; but, second, they had a statutory rate of about 27 percent. How has that merger and being a 

Canadian company affected your ability to do acquisitions? 

Mr. SCHILLER. Sure. So at the time, as I mentioned in my opening statement, we were equal in size and small in the context of 

the global pharmaceutical industry, in similar therapeutic areas, 

similar geographies, focused in the United States and Canada, and 

both struggling to get scale. The companies came together. The decision to be in Canada did not drive the discussion, did not drive 

the decision that the merger made sense. But when it came down 

to constructing the transaction, there was only one possibility if the 

transaction were to occur, and that was to be in Canada, because 

if we were to contemplate coming to the United States, there would 

have been such significant dyssynergies that it would make coming 
40 

up with a price that both sides would agree to and both sets of 

shareholders would agree to impossible. 

Senator PORTMAN. Including the tax advantages in going to Canada, as we talked about earlier. 

Mr. SCHILLER. Yes. Those dyssynergies I am talking about are 

tax dyssynergies. 

Senator PORTMAN. OK. So you go there, and my question to you 

is acquisitions. In that short period of time, since 2010, you have 

made lots of acquisitions. In fact, you say you started a small company. Now you have made $36 billion worth of acquisitions, $30 billion in the United States, just in that short period of time. So I 

think one of the words you used in the testimony was it kind of 

‘‘turbocharged’’ your ability to do acquisitions. And that is part of, 

what we are looking at here, not just U.S. companies leaving our 

shores because of the tax disadvantages in the United States, but 

also once they leave, then looking back into the United States and 

acquiring additional companies. And you have been very successful 

doing that. 

One of the companies that you acquired was Bausch & Lomb. We 

will talk about that. Another is Medicis. Another is Salix. And in 

each of those, you showed us kind of what you were looking for, 

which makes sense. A company is not going to purchase another 

company just to make things break even. You want to make a nice 

return. And you were talking about a significant return. You were 

looking for 20-percent rate of return over a 6-year—and a 6-year 

payback period. That is the deal, basically will pay for itself in 6 

years. And in these three cases, it looks like you got to that, or very 

close to that because of the synergies, as you say, on the tax side 

in large measure—not that these did not make sense for other reasons. So when I look at these decisions that you have made, I see 

them as being tax motivated, and they have worked for you. 

Salix, by the way, we will talk about first, if you do not mind. 

Here is a U.S. company. They were thinking about inverting. The 

Federal Government, the Obama Administration comes up with the 

regulations against inversions, particularly the percentage of 

shareholders that have to be foreign. They say, well, that is going 

to stop us from inverting, so let us just become a target of a foreign 

takeover. So here is a company that was blocked by Federal regulations from doing what they were going to do, invert; instead, they 

say, ‘‘Let us just be taken over by a foreign company.’’ And, indeed, 

11 of the 12 companies that bid for them were foreign, and you all 

won that bid. 

On Salix, if you look at page 80 of the appendix, I can see where 

you have laid out some different results based on what the tax rate 

might be. And, again, that makes sense from your point of view, 

specifically, this idea that, you wanted to be able to show over 6 

years that you could get effectively the return to shareholders that 

would make the deal pay for itself at a 20-percent internal rate of 

return. 

My question for you is: With regard to Salix, is this presentation 

made by the Valeant management to the Valeant board one that 

you think was instructive to the board to make the decision to 

move forward with the deal? In other words, were these tax alternatives that you laid what really led to the board’s decision? 
41 

Mr. SCHILLER. Sure. So as I mentioned in my opening statement, 

there is no question being a Canadian company subject to their territorial tax regime has created significant benefits for the company 

and its shareholders. I would, however, describe the benefits and 

how we capture those benefits slightly differently than as was laid 

out. 

As I mentioned in my opening statement, when we look at a target, we are looking at whether it is a strategic fit, first and foremost. Second, we are looking at whether or not the returns are sufficient for our shareholders. It is their money; deploying capital is 

probably the most important responsibility a senior management 

team has. 

We look at statutory tax rates when we are looking at deploying 

capital. We look at lots of other factors and run lots of scenarios, 

including what we think the tax rate would be, a scenario with the 

tax rate in our hands. That is not a benefit we give to a seller. That 

is a benefit that we retain for our shareholders. 

So in the Salix case, the materials you pointed out, the debate 

in the board room was whether a 15-, 16-percent return was sufficient to go forward or whether we should wait for higher return opportunity that meet our thresholds, and the decision was that it 

was a great company, it was sufficient, and we put a lot of capital 

to work very quickly, and rather than waiting for other things to 

come along, uncertainty in terms of timing, size, quality, et cetera. 

The benefit that we clearly get is, in our hands, a dollar of revenue, we will bring more of that dollar of revenue to the bottom 

line than somebody that has a much higher tax rate, which gives 

us the ability to reinvest in our business, expand plants and R&D, 

or make other acquisitions and grow faster, create more value, become a more attractive employer, lots of other benefits. 

Senator PORTMAN. Well, let me just, with regard to this question—and I will then turn back to Senator McCaskill. You showed 

the board how this acquisition would play out at three tax rates, 

as I see it here. One is a 36-percent rate, which was very close to 

Salix’s projected effective tax rate of 32. And then the two lower 

rates you thought were possible after the acquisition, 5 percent and 

10 percent. That is what is laid out in your materials. 

Looking at this page, the only scenario that shows Valeant hitting or exceeding this targeted 20-percent internal rate of return 

was the company’s lower-rate scenarios. So, again, assuming a 

share price of 160 bucks, Valeant projected that its internal rate 

of return on Salix would be 15.6 percent at the U.S. rate, but would 

jump up to 21 and 22 percent at the lower tax rates. Isn’t that 

right? 

Mr. SCHILLER. The numbers you called out are correct, but the 

debate at the board was whether the 15, 16 percent was sufficient. 

The other scenarios are clearly meant to demonstrate the value 

to our shareholders, what they will ultimately get if we are able 

to achieve those tax rates. But in terms of evaluating whether to 

go forward with Salix, the debate in the board room was whether 

accepting something lower than our targets was sufficient, was a 

good enough risk-reward for our shareholders at that time. But, 

again, the significant benefit is there in our hands, and our shareholders will get that benefit. 
42 

Senator PORTMAN. Well, given that Valeant projects that it would 

only reach your target, which is the 20-percent rate of return, by 

dramatically cutting Salix’s tax bill, I think it is fair to say the tax 

savings were an important driver of the deal, particularly because 

you told us that, you all are disciplined about it—which makes 

sense from a business point of view that you are disciplined about 

your financial guidelines and ‘‘across the board, the majority of our 

transactions are delivered above that targeted 20-percent rate of 

return.’’ 

Again, this is not about criticizing a company for looking at what 

the rate of return is and considering tax rates as part of that projection. But it is very clear to me in looking at the material you 

provided us—and this will come as no surprise to anybody who has 

looked at the U.S. tax system—that this is a significant reason that 

you all have proceeded not just with this transaction but with other 

transactions, including the other two we have looked at in some 

depth, because there you were able to make your 20-percent return 

on acquisitions, and without the tax advantage, you would not have 

been able to. 

So, again, I appreciate your providing the information to us. I do 

think this is an opportunity for us to dig a little deeper in these 

examples, as we have in our report, to be able to understand what 

the real consequences are of the United States refusing to change 

its Tax Code and what it means in terms of not just losing U.S. 

company headquarters, but also losing jobs and investment. 

I am going to have to go to another Committee to mark up one 

of my bills, and I am going to ask Senator McCaskill if she would 

please take the chair, and, again, gentlemen, both of you, thank 

you very much for coming and for your willingness to provide us 

important information that will help us in our objective here, which 

is to come up with a Tax Code that makes sense for our country 

and for our workers. Thank you. 

Senator MCCASKILL [Presiding.] Thank you, Mr. Chairman. 

I just have a couple more questions, and we will let you go. For 

both of you, Mr. Galvin—did you all hear the previous panel’s testimony? So Mr. Galvin from Emerson talked about a 25-percent tax 

rate making us competitive because of other factors and he said if 

we went down to 10 or 12 percent, then you would have a race to 

the bottom by other countries that perhaps do not have the same 

leverage as we have and that the key is to make us competitive. 

Do you agree with his statement that a 25-percent rate would 

make us competitive? 

Mr. SCHILLER. Honestly, we have never spent a lot of time analyzing what rate in the United States would even the playing field. 

It is a tough analysis because security, rule of law, quality of workforce, infrastructure, there are so many other factors that go into 

play. And taxes is one cost item out of a very complex analysis. 

Being competitive with—and you also have to take into account 

all the other rules around rates. Harmonizing rules and harmonizing rates would clearly take tax out of the equation. So I think 

it is a bit more complex than just is 25 percent the right number. 

Senator MCCASKILL. Yes? 

Mr. KOBZA. As I mentioned in my opening remarks and in response to Senator Portman’s question, our decision to domicile the 
43 

combined company in Canada was driven by a number of factors 

which were outside of tax considerations. So it is not a question 

that we considered in great detail, and I am not an expert in 

United States or global tax, so I would have difficulty to respond 

to what exact rate would make the U.S. competitive. 

Senator MCCASKILL. Would it be helpful for both of your companies—both of your companies are examples of companies that 

make—you still make the majority of your money in America, don’t 

you? 

Mr. KOBZA. In fact, for the combined company with Restaurant 

Brands International, only about 25 percent of our combined earnings are in the United States. 

Senator MCCASKILL. OK. So you do not, but you do, Mr. Schiller, 

and I think there is a boatload of companies out there that still do, 

even though they may be parking money offshore because of tax 

reasons or being acquired by foreign investors for tax reasons or inverting for tax reasons. I think it would be important for us to get 

input about this. I think we need to know as much as possible, because tackling the Tax Code is hard around here, and it is not 

something we are going to go back and do again the next year. If 

we get this done, it will be in place for a while. So I think the more 

input we get, the better. 

And the other question I had for you, Mr. Schiller, that I did not 

get to on my first round was: What were the benefits to your company of shipping manufacturing activity to Canada? I know that 

you did most of the contract manufacturing for both Medicis and 

Salix out of Canada. What were the advantages of manufacturing 

moving there? 

Mr. SCHILLER. Well, up until Bausch & Lomb, we had no manufacturing facilities in the United States. Bausch & Lomb had some; 

Salix had none. So Valeant and Salix were using contract manufacturers. 

We did have two plants, two large—we had three plants, but two 

large facilities in Canada—one in Steinbach, Manitoba, and one in 

Laval. And when we bought it, it was really looking at the cost of 

manufacturing through the contract manufacturing operations 

(CMOs), through the contract manufacturers, as to what we could 

do internally. And the plant in Laval was a dermatology plant, so 

it had all the capabilities of making the Medicis products—we have 

not done anything with Salix. We just closed Salix April 1, and I 

do not suspect we are going to be moving any Salix products anytime soon. So a few of the Medicis products we did, and some of 

the legacy Valeant products we have moved from CMOs as well, 

but it is based on the cost of manufacturing in our own plant 

versus what the contract manufacturers charge. 

The Bausch & Lomb plants continue to run well, and we are 

looking to add capacity there because they are very good. The 

Clearwater and Tampa, Florida, plants and the Greenville, South 

Carolina, plants are very efficient plants, and we are looking to add 

capacity there when we can. 

Senator MCCASKILL. Well, to whatever extent you can share with 

the Committee the analysis of contract manufacturing in Canada 

versus the United States and what the differentials are—— 
44 

Mr. SCHILLER. In Canada, it is not a contract manufacturer. It 

is our own plants. 

Senator MCCASKILL. You do not have any contract manufacturing in Canada? 

Mr. SCHILLER. I do not think we use contract manufacturers in 

Canada. 

Senator MCCASKILL. Well, what would be helpful to us is to see 

what the differentials are on contract manufacturing in the United 

States and other places. If you analyze contract manufacturing, I 

am assuming you looked at analysis that would include contract 

manufacturing in the United States, and it would be helpful for us 

to understand what factors weighed in there against contract manufacturing. 

Mr. SCHILLER. Each product is unique, but in general, contract 

manufacturers have 15-to 20-percent margins, and the question is 

whether or not—so that is the margin they are earning for providing a service. 

Senator MCCASKILL. Right. 

Mr. SCHILLER. So that we would certainly save. Then the question is whether we can manufacture—the raw material costs are 

not going to be very different. It is a question of whether our operating costs are lower, higher, or the same, and it is really a product-by-product analysis. 

Senator MCCASKILL. I guess one of the reasons I am interested 

is that if there was an analysis that went on on the cost of contract 

manufacturing, if there was an analysis of contract manufacturing 

in the United States, that is going to have an add-on—right? But 

so is contract manufacturing in Canada. If that analysis was done, 

it would be very helpful for us to see it, because we have a lot of 

people complaining that, the reason that Canada is more attractive 

is that labor costs are lower, but they have a single-payer system 

up there. And so I am trying to figure out how that all works, and 

as we analyze the Tax Code, including what is deductible and what 

is not, it would be important for us to have the benefit of any analysis your company has done. We need to see what you see so we 

can understand how we can be more competitive. 

I think that the record will remain open for 15 days and will 

close on August 14 for this hearing. There may be other questions 

that we might have for you and for the other witnesses. We have 

a hard job, and it is exacerbated by the fact that we all do not see 

things the same way around here. So we are going to try to do our 

best to make the United States as competitive as it should be with 

all the other countries in the world in terms of job growth and economic strength. In the process, I just want to make sure that we 

do not diminish the natural strengths that still make our country 

a beacon to the world for R&D and innovation. I am sorry to say 

I am going to try to talk the Chairman into trying to figure out 

how we can look at—it is astounding—the merger and acquisitions 

that are going on in pharmaceuticals. What did my briefing say, 

what percentage of the income came from M&A over the last year, 

like 45 or—yes, I mean, a huge percentage over the last 3 or 4 

years has just been through M&A. And in that process, how these 

drugs are being priced I think is a fascinating thing for us to understand, because that is what drives our debt right now, is health 
45 

care costs. That is the big problem we have in terms of our competitiveness in the future, is how do we get a handle on our entitlement debt, which is driven by and large by health care costs in 

Medicare. Sorry, but your company—I am sure you are not outside 

the realm of what is going on with other companies. I do not mean 

to pick on your company. But that drug is a great example of, I 

think, questions we need to ask about how this is happening and 

why. 

Thank you both for being here, and I thank the first panel, and 

we will try to work together to see if we can level this playing field. 

[Whereupon, at 11:59 a.m., the Subcommittee was adjourned.] 

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