Tax Avoidance
Conduct Screen Corporate Misconduct
Corporate structure manipulation engineered to shed obligations to the public or harmed parties — tax inversions, spin-offs, or bankruptcy structures (e.g. Texas two-step) designed to evade tax exposure or liability rather than solve a genuine business problem.
11 companies currently excluded under this screen
Excluded Companies (11 total)
Showing 11 of 11 companies excluded under this screen.
| Ticker | Company | Reason |
|---|---|---|
| NFLX | NETFLIX INC | Netflix operated a multi-country tax avoidance structure that routed European revenue through the Netherlands to minimize tax obligations, then concealed the scale of its local operations from tax authorities. In Italy, Netflix settled for 55.8 million euros after authorities found a "hidden permanent establishment" — the company had significant local operations but declared minimal local revenue. In France, the National Financial Prosecutor raided Netflix's Paris and Amsterdam offices on November 5, 2024 as part of a criminal probe for "covering up serious tax fraud" opened in November 2022. Netflix declared only 47.1 million euros in French revenue before 2021, then reported 1.2 billion euros after restructuring its corporate structure — revealing years of deliberate revenue concealment. TaxWatch UK documented $327-430 million in profits shifted to tax havens in a single year. The pattern — Netherlands routing, minimal local declarations, restructuring only under investigation pressure — demonstrates systematic tax avoidance across multiple European jurisdictions. |
| LLYVK | LIBERTY MEDIA CORP | Liberty Media Corporation is the parent entity of John Malone's empire of tracking stocks and tax-optimized corporate structures. Tax avoidance is the organizing principle of the Liberty architecture: tracking stocks enable tax-free reorganizations, cash-rich split-offs harvest tax losses, and serial restructurings defer capital gains indefinitely. Liberty Media holds $760M in deferred tax assets and $609M in tax loss carryforwards. The SiriusXM reverse Morris trust (2024) and Liberty Live split-off both relied on external tax opinions rather than IRS private letter rulings. The IRS has won every contested case against Liberty entities: Project Soy ($2.4B deduction denied, district court found "only substantial purpose was tax evasion") and the J:COM foreign tax credit ($240M denied, 10th Circuit 2025). The empire spans Liberty Global (Bermuda parent), Liberty Latin America (Bermuda), Formula One (Jersey, 0% tax), and formerly Liberty Broadband and Liberty TripAdvisor — all structured to minimize tax obligations across jurisdictions. |
| LBRDA | Liberty Broadband Corp Series A | Liberty Broadband Corporation is a holding company whose corporate structure and recent transactions are engineered to manage and minimize tax obligations. The company is party to a tax sharing agreement with Liberty Sirius XM Holdings, under which it is generally responsible for taxes and losses resulting from the separation of that entity. In June 2025, Liberty Broadband entered into a Separation and Distribution Agreement to spin off its subsidiary GCI Liberty. The transaction was structured to be taxable both to Liberty Broadband and its shareholders, a central focus of which was determining whether the distribution would be treated as a dividend for tax purposes. This follows a pattern within the broader Liberty corporate family, which includes an ongoing tax refund suit filed by the government against related entity Liberty Global Inc. in U.S. district court. The company's operations are characterized by complex inter-entity agreements and transactions primarily focused on the tax consequences of corporate separations. |
| JCI | Johnson Controls | Johnson Controls has engaged in corporate restructuring that shifted tax liabilities onto its shareholders. In 2016, the company executed a merger with Tyco International, a transaction structured as a tax inversion that moved Johnson Controls' legal domicile to Ireland. The subsequent proxy statement disclosed that the conversion and cash-out of shares would be taxable events for the company's shareholders, effectively transferring the tax burden from the corporation to individual investors. This structure was engineered to achieve a lower corporate tax rate for Johnson Controls itself. The company has defended this approach in shareholder litigation. In a 2022 brief to the Seventh Circuit, Johnson Controls argued that a dismissed shareholder suit properly upheld the merger's structure. This pattern of using complex corporate reorganizations to shed tax obligations aligns with the tax avoidance exclusion, where corporate maneuvers are designed primarily to evade tax exposure rather than address a genuine operational need. |
| LBTYK | Liberty global PLC class C | Liberty Global is engaged in ongoing tax litigation with the U.S. government concerning the use of intercompany transactions and loss allocations that regulators allege lack economic substance. The U.S. Department of Justice filed a complaint seeking approximately $284 million in taxes and penalties, arguing the company's structures were engineered to avoid tax obligations. A 2022 district court opinion and a subsequent government motion for summary judgment in 2023 indicate the case is advancing, with the core dispute centering on the disallowance of foreign tax credits through an "overall foreign loss" (OFL) designation. The appeal in *Liberty Global v. United States*, noted in 2024, has raised concerns among tax professionals that a broad ruling could threaten the validity of routine international tax planning by applying the economic substance doctrine aggressively. This litigation underscores a pattern of using complex corporate and transactional structures that appear designed primarily to reduce tax liability. |
| FNF | Fidelity National Financial Inc | Fidelity National Financial has employed corporate restructuring techniques that function to isolate and shed liabilities. The company’s acquisition of LandAmerica Financial Group’s two principal title insurance underwriters was executed through a Chapter 11 bankruptcy process, a structure that facilitated the transfer of assets while potentially leaving legacy liabilities behind. Furthermore, the company has pursued significant spin-offs, such as the separation of its Worldpay payment processing business, which reconfigures its corporate form. While such maneuvers can be presented as unlocking shareholder value, their repeated use in conjunction with liability-sensitive acquisitions aligns with a pattern of engineering corporate structures to manage legal and financial exposure. The available evidence does not specify a definitive “Texas two-step” or a purely tax-driven inversion, but the company’s strategic use of bankruptcy and spin-offs places it under this conduct-based scrutiny. |
| FWONA | Liberty edia Formula One Corp Ser | Liberty Media Formula One Group Class A (FWONA) shares are part of John Malone's Liberty Media tax-optimized corporate empire. The Formula One Group's parent company Delta Topco Ltd. is incorporated in Jersey, a Crown dependency with 0% corporate tax rate, enabling the entity to minimize tax obligations on Formula One's global commercial rights revenue. Citizens for Tax Justice documented that Malone personally avoided approximately $200 million in income taxes through a Liberty Global inversion deal with Virgin Media, structured as a corporate "move" from Colorado to London that was in practice a paper relocation only. Malone transferred $600 million of his stake to a charitable trust the day before announcing the inversion and used Treasury regulation loopholes to shield the remaining $260 million. The Liberty empire's systematic use of tracking stocks, inversions, and offshore incorporation represents a pattern of aggressive tax minimization. |
| TT | Trane PLC | Trane Technologies (formerly Ingersoll Rand) relocated its corporate domicile from Bermuda to Ireland in 2009 in a tax inversion, reducing U.S. tax exposure while maintaining its operational headquarters in the United States. Separately, in June 2020, two Trane subsidiaries — Aldrich Pump LLC and Murray Boiler LLC — filed Chapter 11 bankruptcy using the Texas two-step strategy: the company split itself so that one entity received operating assets and the other received asbestos liabilities, then the liability-bearing entity filed for bankruptcy. As of December 2023, the bankruptcy court denied motions to dismiss, and the cases remain pending. The Texas two-step has been widely criticized as a corporate structure manipulation designed to evade tort liability owed to asbestos victims. |
| FWONK | Liberty Media Formula One Corp Ser | Formula One Group is incorporated in Jersey (Channel Islands), which has a 0% corporate income tax rate. The Jersey incorporation serves no operational purpose — F1 is headquartered and operated from London. This is part of John Malone's broader Liberty Media empire of tax-optimized corporate structures. Liberty Media acquired F1 in 2017 via a tax-efficient tracking stock structure. See LLYVK for the full pattern of tax avoidance across the Malone empire. |
| LLYVA | Liberty Media Corp-Liberty Live | Liberty Media Corp - Liberty Live (Class A shares). Same parent entity as LLYVK. Liberty Live was split off from Liberty Media in 2023 as a tracking stock for the Live Nation stake. The split-off was structured as a tax-free transaction relying on external tax opinions rather than an IRS private letter ruling. Part of John Malone's broader empire of tax-optimized corporate structures. See LLYVK for full tax avoidance pattern. |
| CAT | Caterpillar | Caterpillar settled a long-running IRS tax dispute for $740M–$925M (September 2022) over offshore profit shifting through Swiss subsidiary CSARL — routing profits from US parts sales through Switzerland to avoid US taxes over 13 years. IRS and DOJ investigation found Caterpillar used an abusive tax structure to shift $8B+ in profits offshore. |
The Naughty List
A digest of changes to our exclusion list — new additions, removals, and the evidence behind them. We review the list continuously as new evidence surfaces.
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