You paid taxes? Sucker

By TOM CARDAMONE
WASHINGTON POST
If only you'd stashed your money away from Uncle Sam's outstretched hands, where the Internal Revenue Service couldn't find it. Like on a beach. Try the Cayman Islands. Long a popular vacation getaway, the islands are a trendy place to get away from taxes, too.
Tax havens used to be strictly for companies and the mega-rich. But that's no longer the case. By 2006, Americans owned 1.34 trillion in foreign tax havens, up from 796 billion in 2003. That's a 68 percent jump. On the Internet, you can create your own dummy corporation and bank account for less than 1,000 with just a few clicks of a mouse -- Visa and MasterCard accepted. Tax havens drain about 100 billion from the U.S. Treasury each year, according to an estimate by Sen. Carl Levin, D-Mich., who co-sponsored legislation to stop the practice.
Opening an account is not illegal. You start to break the law only when you fail to report interest earned on your account. And nabbing tax cheats is tough, as secrecy laws prevent disclosure of account ownership information. It wasn't until after Enron collapsed that investigators discovered that the company had incorporated 692 offshore subsidiaries in the Cayman Islands alone. In another case out of Texas, billionaire brothers Sam and Charles Wyly allegedly used a complex web of offshore trusts and shell corporations to generate 600 million in profits. At least the Wylys showed some imagination: They named one offshore entity Bubba LLC.
Cardamone is managing director of the Global Financial Integrity program at the Center for International Policy