? A review of legislation he co-authored to crack down on tax shelters. Last week, the Finance Committee passed the Tax Shelter Transparency Act, which imposes a mandatory disclosure regime for tax shelters to allow the Internal Revenue Service to enforce illegal transactions. That bill reflects Grassley's revisions of last year's bill to make it tougher. He said he will review the measure in light of the Enron report and ensure that the bill is tough enough to combat every tax shelter abuse employed by Enron.
? A renewed fight to protect employees' pensions. Last year, the Finance Committee passed Grassley's legislation, the National Employee Savings and Trust Equity Guarantee (NESTEG) Act, to tighten protections for retirement plan participants in the future in light of the collapse of the Enron Corp., WorldCom, Global Crossing and other similarly situated companies. The Senate's Democratic leadership at the time never brought up the bill for full Senate consideration. Grassley said he will re-introduce the legislation and fight to get it passed this year.
? A renewed fight to curb abuses of executive compensation. Grassley's NESTEG Act, which he plans to re-introduce, changes abusive aspects of executive compensation. First, it bans "off-shore rabbi trusts" used to hide executive compensation from creditors, including the IRS. Second, it requires that supplemental payments to executives be taxed at the top rate. Third, it repeals the moratorium imposed on the Treasury Department in 1978 on regulations on deferred compensation. A fourth provision, imposing limitation on loans to executives, was made moot by the ban on loans made in the Sarbanes-Oxley bill last summer.
? A renewed fight to curb corporate expatriation. Last year, the Finance Committee approved Grassley's Reversing the Expatriation of Profits Offshore to rein in companies that set up sham foreign headquarters, such as in Bermuda, to avoid paying millions of dollars of federal taxes. In addition to being unfair to individual taxpayers who must pay their full share, corporate expatriation schemes erode the domestic tax base by creating phony deductions in the United States. The Senate's Democratic leadership last year never brought up the legislation. Grassley said he will re-introduce the legislation and fight to get it passed this year.
"We know Enron's executives couldn't have cared less about the dedicated and unsuspecting employees who worked under them," Grassley said. "Those employees were expendable. The almighty dollar had so blinded them that there was no sense of ethics left. But if they are blind, then it's time for us to let them see the light. We know Enron isn't the only company that engaged in abuse, and it won't be the last to try. But the day of reckoning has come for those who peddle abusive tax products. We'll hunt them down, shut them down, and do whatever it takes to purge this cancer from our system. It may take years, or it may take only months. But the game is over."