Tax Me If You Can

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Frontline

- This Week: "Tax Me If You Can" (60 min.), Thursday, Feb. 19 at 9pm on PBS (check local listings)

It's hard to believe, but some people actually look forward to tax season.

We're not talking about the honest tax professionals who earn a living helping Americans navigate the tax code. We're talking about the corporate tax shelter promoters, including those at some of the country's most respected accounting and law firms, who concoct sophisticated and often illegitimate tricks that can reduce a company's taxes to zero and turn the tax line on a corporate financial report into -- ready for this? -- a profit center.

Meanwhile, the rest of us end up paying the bill. Somewhere between $250 to $300 billion in taxes are owed but not paid each year, and the largest single source of the gap, according to former Republican IRS commissioner Charles Rossotti, is abusive tax shelters. What this means, Rossotti tells FRONTLINE, is "basically ... everybody is paying 15 percent more -- you could give everybody twice as big a refund, if they average it out, if you just collected all the taxes that are due."

In "Tax Me If You Can," this Thursday, Feb. 19 at 9pm on PBS (check local listings), FRONTLINE correspondent Hedrick Smith -- whose recent report "The Wall Street Fix," about WorldCom and its investment bankers, earned an Emmy for business reporting -- follows the tax-shelter trail to some far-flung and surprising places, investigating the companies behind the tax schemes, how the schemes work, and how they're sold. Along the way he talks to former IRS and Treasury officials from the Reagan, Clinton, and current Bush administrations, tax experts, industry insiders, and members of Congress from both parties who are battling some of Washington's most powerful lobbyists to put a stop to the big business of illegitimate shelters.

So please join us on Thursday night, and on the Web following the broadcast. In addition to extended interviews with Charles Rossotti, former Treasury Secretary Lawrence Summers, and other experts, our website will offer a look at KPMG's aggressively marketed shelters, and at the prospects for reform. And as always, we hope you'll join the discussion, at frontline shows

Finally, in conjunction with the television broadcast, FRONTLINE and the public radio program Marketplace are producing a two-part series based upon Hedrick Smith's investigation. The radio series airs this Wednesday and Thursday, Feb. 18-19, on Marketplace, and will be available at marketplace.org

Wen Stephenson
Website Managing Editor
FRONTLINE