The AFL-CIO has long called for an end to tax subsidies for companies that ship jobs overseas. Now, in a new report, Citizens for Tax Justice shows just how much money these loopholes are costing us. The new report finds that U.S. multinational corporations are engaging in a massive amount of tax avoidance, particularly through tax havens in small countries like Bermuda. The corporations report that they "earned" large portions of their profits in tiny, low-tax countries in order to lower their tax rates, despite not having much, if any, actual activity or profit in those countries. Bermuda, for instance, is home to reported profits by American companies that are 1,000% of the country's actual GDP.

Often a corporation will have little more than a mailbox in the small, low-tax country, while having massive operations and workforces in the United States. The amount of revenue lost in the United States is significant, according to the report:

In 2008, American multinational companies reported earning 43% of their $940 billion in overseas profits in the five little tax-haven countries, even though only four percent of their foreign workforce and seven percent of their foreign investments were in these countries.

If the profits from those companies were accurately reported and taxed in the United States, it could make a significant dent in the budget deficit and corporations would pay an effective tax rate much closer to the rate they are supposed to pay, according to the tax code. Citizens for Tax Justice says that tax avoidance problems can be greatly reduced by Congress passing legislation to end "deferral" on the process of allowing corporations to not pay taxes on current profits by shifting them overseas and then allowing the companies to later "repatriate" the profits with little or no taxes applied to them.