'Chairman Rangel Has Not Supported Tax Havens in the Caribbean or Anywhere Else'

It's comforting to know Barack Obama has tax cheats Tim Geithner and Charles Rangel as the frontmen for cracking down on offshore tax shelters. Especially Rangel, who has plenty of experience helping people hide money.

A spokesman for Rangel on the committee, Matthew Beck, said yesterday the move was an effort to bring the USVI statute of limitations for audits into line with those on the mainland -- and he denied that Rangel "held up" any bills. "Chairman Rangel has not supported tax havens in the Caribbean or anywhere else," Beck added.

Presumably Rangel's support also had nothing to do with the $112,500 Virgin Islands donors put into his coffers during the last three election cycles.

The administration also merits some scrutiny -- particularly the co-chairman of the President's Council of Advisers on Science and Technology, Harold Varmus, Obama's point-man on the stem-cell decision. He is president of Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York -- which, according to its 2007 IRS 990 form, maintains an "office" in Bermuda.

Sloan-Kettering's chief financial officer says the "office" is just "a drawer in a file cabinet" that legally allows the hospital to avoid paying higher taxes on malpractice insurance. CFO Michael Gutnick says buying the insurance in New York would be prohibitively expensive, because the state's high taxes get factored into premiums. Not so in Bermuda, where the hospital has had dealings for about six years. (Before Bermuda, it was the Cayman Islands.)

Now the hospital is in the process of moving the insurance to Burlington, Vt., saying it hasn't been able to find the "talent" in Bermuda to manage the insurance adequately. For six years, though, it was willing to reap the financial benefits of Bermuda's lower tax rates.

What was that in Obama's speech about "ending tax breaks for companies that ship jobs overseas"? Sloan-Kettering is a 501(c)3 nonprofit, and Gutnick says the maintenance of overseas captive insurance policies by tax-exempt hospitals is "commonplace." Will Obama end that mega-tax break for organizations that ship insurance jobs overseas, starting with the hospital run by his own science adviser?

Don't hold your breath.

Change!