President Donald Trump’s onslaught of tariffs was initially meant to grow government revenue. However, they may have inadvertently enabled a multi-billion dollar tax scheme for the U.S. economy: Companies have found tactics to evade the sky-high tariffs and are engaging in fraud that could have dire consequences for the country, including lowered federal tax revenues and reduced GDP.
The White House is now cracking down on these tariff dodgers. In a report on Tuesday, the administration chronicled the magnitude of the problem and outlined how it’s trying to curb it. It claimed the U.S. is losing between $19 billion to $26 billion in tax revenue annually as a result of countries routing exports through other countries in order to evade levies, in a process called transshipment.
