Questão 739290

Text I – items 31 to 37

A taxing battle

1____Nobody wants to pay taxes. No wonder, then, that

so many companies spend so much effort trying to avoid

them. Almost every big corporate scandal of recent years,

4 from Enron to Parmalat, has involved tax-dodging in one

form or another.

In the latest revelation on January 26^th, Dick

7 Thornburgh, the man appointed to look at the collapse of

World-Com, released a report claiming that, as well as the

slew of other crooked dealings of which the bankrupted

10 telecoms company is guilty, it also bilked the Internal

Revenue Service (IRS) of hundreds of millions of dollars in

taxes through a tax shelter cooked up by KPMG, its auditor.

13___Tax authorities around the wo rld rightly fret that

such cases are the tip of a large iceberg, and they are starting

to act. In America, home to many of the best-known

16 corporate-tax scams of recent years, the Bush administration

has announced a series of anti- tax-dodging measures in its

new budget, which will be presented to Congress on

19 February 2^nd, including an extra \$300 million to boost

enforcement and the shutt i n g of corporate-tax dodges that

could bring in, it reckons, up to \$45 billion over the next

22 ten years.

_{The Economist, January 31st - February 6th , 2004, p. 71 (with adaptations).}

Still in relation to text I, judge the following items.

The author's purpose is to show that governments around the world are scrabbling for scarce corporate taxes.