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Your GOP Congress at work:

WASHINGTON, D.C. – Proposed House legislation that would grant a tax amnesty to multinational corporations bringing home billions of dollars of profits now offshore in order to fund an infrastructure bank was strongly criticized today in a letter to House members signed by 30 national organizations working to ensure that big corporations pay their fair share of taxes.

The Partnership to Build America Act, H.R. 2084, introduced by Rep. John Delaney (D-MD), would reward big corporations that avoid taxes through overseas accounting tricks, encourage more future offshore tax dodging, fail to create jobs in America and increase the deficit, according to the letter’s signers, which include AFSCME, MoveOn.org, the National Education Association and the National Committee to Preserve Social Security and Medicare (full list of signers is below).

This most recent push by corporations for the tax holiday is “nothing more than a blatant attempt to escape their tax obligations and shift the burden onto taxpaying Americans, small businesses and domestic firms,” the groups wrote.

The letter signers emphasized that past amnesties have failed to deliver for the American people, instead merely enriching executives and shareholders. The requirement in the current bill that corporations “repatriating” their profits invest part of them in an infrastructure bank does nothing to improve the legislation, since several tax dodging corporations will control the proposed bank, inviting collusion and financial game playing.

Many of the companies bringing home profits under a 2004 repatriation amnesty actually reduced employment, according to the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations; of the corporate cash repatriated, 92 percent went to stock buybacks, executive bonuses and dividends, according to a study by the National Bureau of Economic Research, the letter noted.

Endorsing the concept of an infrastructure bank as a stand-alone idea, the letter signers wrote: “Congress should finance infrastructure investment by closing offshore tax loopholes, not by encouraging corporations to use them.”

The letter was coordinated by Americans for Tax Fairness and the Financial Accountability and Transparency (FACT) Coalition.

Now read this:

Individual income tax payments have been rising fast since the economy began to recover, even though wages have hardly budged. But the same isn’t true for taxes for most corporations.

For the vast majority of America’s 5.8 million corporations, profits soared in 2010 — up 53 percent compared to 2009 — when the recession official ended at mid-year. Despite skyrocketing profits, however, their corporate income tax bills actually shrank by $1.9 billion, or 2.6 percent.

The effective tax rate paid by 99.95 percent of companies fell to 15.9 percent in the robustly profitable year of 2010, from 24.9 percent in the half-recession year 2009.

Those figures do not count the 2,772 companies that dominate the American economy. These giant firms, with an average of $23 billion in assets, own 81 percent of all business assets in America.

Their combined profits soared 45.2 percent to a new record in 2010, but their taxes rose just 14.8 percent, new IRS data show. Profits growing three times faster than taxes means their effective tax rates fell.

In 2010 these corporate giants paid just 16.7 percent of their profits in taxes, down from 21.1 percent in 2009. The official tax rate is 35 percent.