Tax Inversions Succeed When Government Lawyers Go Private

Hal Hicks cleared his throat and addressed a roomful of peers in a midtown Manhattan auditorium. The topic: the tax-avoidance technique called inversion, in which a U.S. company claims a foreign legal address.

Waving his hands back and forth as if tracing a pendulum’s swing, Hicks explained how four government attacks over three decades had failed to stop the practice. “There’s been lots of law thrown at these transactions,” he said at the January session.