Caterpillar Inc share price up, faces U.S. evaluation by Senate committee over tax-avoiding strategies

The official representatives of Caterpillar Inc., which is a manufacturer of construction and mining equipment, will try to prove it shares the responsibility of millions of Americans in filing their income-tax returns. Now it is turn to Caterpillars executive officers to be put under evaluation by the senate committee for allegedly exploiting opportunities to avoid paying taxes estimated to billions of dollars.

The biggest maker of heavy machinery in the world is to be reviewed by the Senates Permanent Subcommittee of Investigations for its use of a variety of offshore tax strategies in order to save large amounts of money by decreasing tax bills. The effective income-tax rate has been said by the company to be at about 29% in spite of the strategies in question.

The subcommittee is put under the lead of Carl Levin, who is known for rebuking these tax-evasion strategies through the so-called “complex structures, dubious transactions and legal fictions”.

As reported by the Financial Times, Caterpillar Inc. made an official statement, saying that its tax practice fits the overall ideas of the company ”with a large manufacturing and distribution footprint in the United States and around the world”.

It also said in its statement: “Caterpillar’s effective tax rate averages about 29 per cent, which is relatively high for a company with substantial earnings generated from business activities outside the United States.”

The official representatives of the company preparing to defend its corporate restructuring that happened in the late 1990s, which is considered to have been beneficial to cutting the taxes in the U.S. One of the spokeswomen of the accounting firm PricewaterhouseCoopers LLP, who consulted Caterpillar for the restructuring commented that the reorganization in question “better aligned an American companys global operations with economic realities and was fully compliant with tax laws”.

Caterpillar Inc. settled 0.95% higher on Friday in New York at $99.39 per share, marking a one-year change of +14.28% and a market capitalization of $63.39 billion. According to CNN Money, the 23 analysts offering 12-month price forecasts for Caterpillar Inc. have a median target of $98.00, with a high estimate of $122.00 and a low estimate of $85.00. The median estimate represents a -1.40% decrease from the last price of $99.39.