The latter, an honest taxpayer who relied on incorrect information given her by an IRS information line, lost her battle after two years of bureaucratic run-around. Haven s Gate Tax experts like Burton Kanter who has represented film producer Saul Zaentz and the family that owns the Hyatt hotel chain use their decades of legal and tax expertise to create large pyramids of trusts to help their clients evade millions in tax payments. Others, like self-styled offshore trust guru Jerome Schneider, offer to set up private banks in Caribbean nations with lax or nominal banking regulation for a hefty fee, of course. View two schematics of an alleged shelter that the IRS says Kanter set up to hide profits from One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest . But the individual income taxpayers chunk of the federal revenues grew by 15 percent from the 1960s to the 1990s.
Corporations find new ways to reduce their tax loads every day.
The question in the executive boardroom has become not how the company can pay its taxes, but how it can avoid them. Corporations, with the help of a cottage industry of former IRS attorneys and accountants, abuse the tax code to reduce their taxable income. That s par for the course for Kaiser. One of the nation s wealthiest men, and a mover and shaker in his hometown of Tulsa, has paid little or nothing in taxes year after year. Shore Leave Several U.S. firms, like Apple Computer and Seagate Technology, have set up manufacturing operating in Singapore and other Pacific locales and to avoid paying U.S. income taxes and laying off thousands of U.S. workers in the process, preferring cheaper Asian labor forces.