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Politics : PRESIDENT GEORGE W. BUSH -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Zoltan! who wrote (225678)	2/6/2002 12:10:50 PM
From: DuckTapeSunroof	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 769667

Your article is bumping into a tree in the dark, and missing the forest, I'm afraid it's sadly out of touch with reality: >>> The most determinative act wasn't the SEC's rule making in regard to Investment Company Act of 1940 interpretations, but rather the Congressional shoot-down of Chairman Levitt's 6 year long campaign to tighten the rules governing the accounting profession. Accounting rules, afterall, have a much broader impact. Among other things, Chairman Levitt wanted to prohibit accountants from holding consulting contracts with the same firms they held audit contracts with. He called it: "clearly a conflict of interest" - which of course it is - and history has now demonstrated the wisdom of that view. He predicted in his congressional testimony that there would be trouble coming out of that ethical conflict of interest. One doesn't want to put the watchdogs guarding the sheep to sheep while their are wolves out there. As to the strong congressional opposition to chairman Levitt's long, lonely campaign... it was led by leaders from both parties (including Lieberman, but there was a very strong pro-Big-Business Republican tinge to it overall, too). ... Now, as to the advisability of corporations moving funds to offshore tax and secrecy haven jurisdictions... I will only note two things: 1) It's legal, and there is no law requiring people to pay taxes they are not legally required to pay. And, 2) support of the entire system of offshore tax shelters has been strong within the Republican party for years (rightly or wrongly, it was the Clinton administration and Secretary Rubin who led mostly ineffectual attacks on the haven system during his two terms against Republican defenses). That Republican support for tax havens was renewed this past year when the Bush administration shot down the O.E.C.D.'s world-wide campaign to enforce 'tax equalization' and 'tax information sharing' between nations, and to restrict or ban the use of numbered secret accounts. Dick Armey has been the most outspoken US politician of all over the last year in opposing the O.E.C.D.'s plan to prevent 'tax competition', as they call it. (The process whereby low tax jurisdictions - such as the US, or so called 'haven' nations - attract businesses and deposits from the high tax EU nations.)