Love those CEOs obfuscating the truth. I know, you’re shocked. This little pearl comes in the arena of tax avoidance.

You may recall my previous posts on tax “inversions”, that clever little maneuver companies do to avoid paying taxes in the U.S. by reincorporating abroad (see here). Well, now comes Abbott Labs CEO Miles White who is upset that anyone would see what his company would so as tax avoidance. CTJ has it down pat:

In a July 18 Wall Street Journal op-ed, White suggests that there are no tax benefits to inversion: “Inversion doesn’t change a company’s tax rate. A company pays the same tax rate in the U.S. after inversion as it does before inverting. A company also pays the same tax rates in foreign domiciles before and after inversion,” he wrote.

While it is technically true that inverted companies should continue to pay the 35 percent U.S. tax rate on any U.S. profits, the experience of previous inversions tells us that U.S. tax rates will likely become mostly irrelevant to these companies post-inversion because they will move aggressively to make their U.S. profits appear to be foreign.

For example, the manufacturer Ingersoll-Rand, after inverting to become a Bermuda corporation in 2001, immediately went from reporting annual U.S. profits of hundreds of millions to reporting losses or very small profits each year, while it’s reported profits outside the United States expanded dramatically. This did not reflect any actual loss of U.S. customers or business. Rather, the corporation accomplished this by loaning $3 billion to its U.S. subsidiary, which then deducted the interest payments on the debt to effectively wipe out its U.S. income for tax purposes. It seems likely that this practice, called earnings stripping, would be aggressively used by Walgreens, Medtronic, Mylan, and each of the other large U.S. companies that are currently contemplating an inversion.

It’s a scam. It’s legal. But, guys like White have the gall to try to dress it up as something else.