(Bloomberg) Caterpillar Inc., the bellwether U.S. equipment maker praised just last week by President Donald Trump, now finds itself a government target as federal tax and banking authorities raided its Illinois offices.
The investigation comes as new chief executive officer Jim Umpleby shifts its global headquarters to Chicago to bolster the machinery maker’s push into foreign markets. Last week, Doug Oberhelman, the company’s chairman, participated in discussions at the White House, where President Donald Trump said “I love Caterpillar.”
The Internal Revenue Service, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. and the Commerce Department on Thursday searched Caterpillar locations in Peoria, East Peoria and Morton, according to Sharon Paul, a spokeswoman for the U.S. attorney’s office for the Central District of Illinois, said by telephone.
Declining to comment on the nature of the raid, she said that in other cases the U.S. attorney’s office has dealt with the IRS’s Criminal Investigations unit and Commerce’s Office of Export Enforcement.
The stock fell 4.8 percent to $93.77 at 2:15 p.m. in New York, heading for the biggest decline since June.
Earlier Probe
Although the focus of the raids wasn’t clear, the company said in an annual filing last month that it received a grand jury subpoena from the U.S. District Court for the Central District of Illinois in January 2015.
The subpoena requested documents relating to, among other things, financial information on U.S. and non-U.S. Caterpillar subsidiaries. That included undistributed profits of non-U.S. subsidiaries and the movement of cash among U.S. and non-U.S. subsidiaries, the company said. The Morton facility receives and ships replacement parts to dealers globally.
The manufacturer said it got additional subpoenas relating to this investigation requesting more information on the purchase and resale of replacement parts by Caterpillar and non-U.S. Caterpillar subsidiaries, as well as dividend distributions of certain non-U.S. Caterpillar subsidiaries. The company said in the filing that it believes this matter “will not have a material adverse effect on the company’s consolidated results of operations, financial position or liquidity.”
Caterpillar, which has a financial unit that lends to customers, confirmed Thursday’s searches and said it was cooperating.
“The timing is surprising, but there have been publicly stated concerns in the past, and it could be potentially related to that,” said Macquarie analyst Sameer Rathod. Caterpillar’s “transfer pricing accounting was under a microscope and we haven’t really heard anything on these for a long time.”
Swiss Case
In a 2009 whistle-blower lawsuit, a former Caterpillar executive accused the company of using offshore subsidiaries in Switzerland and Bermuda to avoid about $2 billion in U.S. taxes from 2000 to 2009. The company sold and shipped spare parts globally from Illinois while improperly attributing at least $5.6 billion of profit from those sales to a unit in Geneva, according to claims made in that lawsuit, which was settled in 2012.
In 2014, the U.S. Senate’s Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations followed up on the executive’s claims and found that Caterpillar had “shifted billions of dollars in profits away from the United States and into Switzerland.” In Switzerland, Caterpillar had an effective corporate tax rate of 4 percent to 6 percent, the panel found—far less than the 35 percent U.S. corporate income tax rate. Caterpillar told the Senate panel that it had fully complied with U.S. tax law.
Last month, the company said in an annual filing that it is “vigorously contesting” about $2 billion in additional tax and penalties that it says the IRS is proposing to collect on “profits earned from certain parts transactions” by a subsidiary in Switzerland known as Caterpillar SARL.
“We believe the relevant transactions complied with applicable tax laws and did not violate judicial doctrines,” Caterpillar said in the disclosure.
A spokesman for the FDIC declined to comment on Thursday’s raids. Justin Cole, a spokesman for the IRS Criminal Investigation division, confirmed that its agents were on-site, without elaborating.
—Joe Deaux and Joe Richter, with assistance from Jesse Westbrook, David Voreacos, Sara Forden, John Voskuhl and Esha Dey
