Zach Mider is a New York-based enterprise reporter for Bloomberg. He works on a variety of special projects, and he put Bloomberg in the news recently with some of the first in-depth reporting on tax inversions, now a hotly debased issue in the U.S.
In Depth sat down with Zach to discuss what it’s like to cover such a trending topic and the role of enterprise stories in Bloomberg’s overall coverage.
To you, what’s the most interesting part of covering tax inversion?
One of the reasons that the U.S. tax system is riddled with unfairness is that the average citizen can’t begin to fathom how it works. That’s why it’s fun to write about inversions. Inversions have a certain absurdity that the average person can appreciate. It doesn’t make sense that a company can lower its tax bill by $170 million a year by opening a post office box in Dublin. That’s why people have latched onto it as a political issue, and why it’s fun to write about.
Because tax avoidance can be a controversial issue, I imagine it can be difficult to find willing sources. Can you share any secrets about how you find sources and get them to discuss sensitive issues on the record?
Company officials aren’t keen to discuss details of inversion transactions because they understand how they’re perceived by most Americans. So you have to use leverage to encourage people to talk. That means doing your homework, mostly through using documents, to assemble the facts in a coherent order.
You also work on enterprise stories for Bloomberg. Are there any topics that are of special interest to you? Can you discuss the value that enterprise coverage — longform pieces, investigations, etc. — adds to Bloomberg’s news offerings?
Bloomberg is increasingly focused on creating stories that are influential beyond our core audience. A lot of these are investigative or enterprise stories. These pieces often end up creating a virtuous circle with our traditional wire-service offerings. As newsmakers come to recognize our influence, we get more opportunities to break news.
Looking ahead to the future, do you anticipate that the trend of people and corporations moving overseas for tax reasons will continue? What do you think the hot-button issue will be in five years?
There’s this eternal cat-and-mouse game: Tax officials close loopholes and stop abuses, and tax lawyers find new opportunities for avoidance. As companies, capital, and people become even more global, I think a lot of the issues will be about how people arbitrage the differences between countries’ tax systems, picking and choosing which rules they want to follow.