SOURCE:  PR Newswire, Parish & Company

Massive Tax Loophole Discovered by Parish & Company, National Leaders Alerted: SEC Chairman Bill Donaldson, FCC Chairman Michael Powell, Secretary of Treasury John Snow, Teamster President James Hoffa, CWA President Mort Bahr, Consumer Advocates Ralph Nader, Dan Meek, Michael Moore, corporate governance leaders Warren Buffett, Bill Gates Sr. and John Bogle and Oregon Investment Council Chair Gerard Drummond and Vice-Chair Diana Goldschmidt
 
PORTLAND, Ore., June 25, 2004 -- Original Parish & Company research has identified a massive tax loophole, recently confirmed by former Senate Finance Committee Chair Bob Packwood, and reported in a June 22, 2004 article by Steve Duin of the Oregonian, Oregon's largest daily.

This loophole results from changes made to the tax  code in the 1980's allowing profitable companies to buy companies with losses and immediately deduct the entire value of such losses against their income, consolidate their tax returns and effectively pay no taxes. Senator Packwood led an effort to close this loophole by only allowing a limited percent of the total loss to be taken each year when a profitable company purchased such losses.

Senator Packwood also now confirms that no one conceived of the company with the losses buying the profitable company and thereby escaping the new limitations.

The danger to the economy now is that failure to close this loophole on both sides is stimulating mergers that make no economic sense and are driven exclusively by this tax dysfunction, often resulting in significant layoffs. Such situations have already occurred in a variety of industries and involving industry leading companies.

In Oregon the Public Utility Commission is now reviewing the proposed purchase of Portland General Electric by the Texas Pacific Group, a private equity firm, and many opponents of this purchase are now calling on Texas Pacific, as reported in a June 25, 2004 Oregonian article by Jeff Manning, to guarantee that taxes paid by ratepayers will actually be paid to the
government, rather than consolidated against such losses.

Parish & Company has provided this discovery based upon original research to major news outlets including the NY Times, Wall Street Journal, USA Today and Barrons with the hope that this loophole will be immediately closed. Although this work is copyrighted, substantially all credited media will be allowed the right to use this work if proper attribution is provided. Additional details are available at http://www.billparish.com