One of the most prominent US political campaigners against offshore tax jurisdictions, Senator Carl Levin (Dem, MI) last week unveiled the Stop Tax Haven Abuse Act in Congress, claiming the US loses about $150 billion a year in lost revenue from such abuse.

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The bill would also, Levin said, “establish rebuttable presumptions to combat offshore secrecy in US tax and securities law enforcement proceedings by shifting to the US taxpayer, who takes advantage of the related loopholes, the burden of proving who controls an offshore entity; when money sent to or received from offshore is taxable income; and when offshore accounts have sufficient funds to trigger a reporting obligation.”

It says the measure would also “stop companies incorporated offshore but managed and controlled from the United States from claiming foreign status and avoiding US taxes on their foreign income by treating them as US domestic corporations for tax purposes.”

Other measures include strengthening detection of offshore activities, and closing an offshore swap payments loophole by treating swap payments that originate in the US as taxable source income; requiring country-by-country reporting by SEC-registered corporations to disclose their staff, gross revenues and tax payments on a per-country basis, and penalizing corporate insiders for hiding offshore holdings with a securities law fine of up to $1 million per violation.