Word: virginal
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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From her second-floor offices bordering the sparkling Caribbean at Charlotte Amalie, the capital of the U.S. Virgin Islands, Catherine Sittig presides over one of the corporate-welfare system's most enduring success stories...
...company sets up what is called a foreign sales corporation. Companies can form FSCs in 32 countries designated by Congress--among them Jamaica and Barbados--or in a U.S. possession like the Virgin Islands. The company then funnels its exports (or, more accurately, the paperwork for its exports) through its offshore FSC. Presto: no federal income taxes on a portion of those export profits...
...required FSCs to be established "in any jurisdiction outside of the U.S. customs territory" and to maintain an office and hold a board-of-directors meeting once a year in the country where they were incorporated. Tourist paradises such as the U.S. Virgin Islands now began to think about bustling office buildings and banks to handle the transplants. The islands' Lieutenant Governor at the time, Julio Brady, told a Senate committee that FSCs would be "real businesses" that would employ "real people. We are not talking about dummy or paper corporations...
...companies, there's yet another advantage to an FSC. As mandated by Congress, directors or their agents must attend one meeting a year in the vicinity of their FSC--a perfect excuse for a vacation in the Caribbean. Indeed, an FSC brochure put out by the Virgin Islands government extols the deep-sea fishing, the snorkeling, the reefs, the beaches, the 80[degree] weather. Its cover reads: U.S. EXPORTERS: TAKE A TAX BREAK IN PARADISE. Catherine Sittig, the FSC manager, said that when she asked one executive why he had located his FSC in Bermuda, he replied, "Because I play...
...company Sittig oversees on St. Thomas, Export Assist Virgin Islands, is one of the islands' largest FSC managers. It employs seven people. Joseph G. Englert, president of its parent, Export Assist, Inc., San Francisco, disputes the notion that FSC management companies are just paper-shuffling operations. "We help [clients] with sales," he says. "We help them with transportation. We do what they call those economic processes, and we do a fair amount, [as] documented by real money being spent in our offices... So things really are going...