Editor, Gazette-Journal:

Last week, the Gazette-Journal had a story about a Mathews couple who had been charged by the IRS with tax evasion and subsequently pleaded guilty. They had, unsuccessfully apparently, tried to relieve their tax burden using some applications of the 56,000 pages of IRS statutes. A few days ago you may have read that GE had all of its tax burden relieved and even ended up with a 3.2 billion dollar refund! To quote an editorial in another paper:

The nation’s largest corporation benefits from something the average taxpayer does not—the best tax department money can buy. According to David Kocieniewski of the New York Times, that team includes former officials of the Internal Revenue Service and Treasury Department, as well as aides to members of the congressional committees who wrote the tax codes. No wonder the federal government ends up owing GE money.

To accomplish this feat, part of what GE has done is to ship about 20 percent of its Americ...