How Team Owners Avoid Millions in Taxes

ESPN Daily

ESPN

Sports

4.6 • 3.9K Ratings

🗓️ 9 July 2021

⏱️ 36 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Franchise owners are some of the wealthiest Americans. Los Angeles Clippers owner Steve Ballmer’s net worth is estimated at more than $100 billion. He’s just one of the billionaires in ProPublica’s investigation on how teams are handled, when it comes to owners’ tax liability. Investigative reporter Robert Faturechi of ProPublica walks us through the tax code as it relates to franchise executives, and how they may wind up paying lower taxes by percentage than not only the players for whom they write their checks, but the workers at their arenas as well. Then Greg Wyshynski tells us how back-to-back Stanley Cup Champions the Tampa Bay Lightning are celebrating fresh off the ice, literally, with a limited-edition beer. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0	When I'm
0:07.0	The Clippers!
0:12.0	When former Microsoft CEO, Steve Bomber, took ownership of the Clippers in 2014,
0:22.9	he was fired up.
0:25.6	Which, look, that makes sense.
0:27.9	Bomber was joining this exclusive club of pro sports franchise owners,
0:32.1	people whose perks include courtside seats and private audiences with superstars,
0:36.8	and, it turns out, a shockingly massive
0:40.9	break on their personal tax bill. Today, we dig into a ProPublica investigation that reveals
0:48.3	how team owners can avoid hundreds of millions of dollars in taxes, even paying lower tax rates than their average arena worker,
0:57.3	and how we even got such a system in the first place.
1:02.4	I'm Pablo Torre. It's Friday, July 9th. This is ESPN Day.
1:11.9	Robert Federici, thank you so much for joining me today, man. I appreciate it.
1:15.1	Thanks for having me, Pablo.
1:16.7	So before we start in on this latest investigation that ProPublica has done into the taxes
1:22.2	paid by sports owners, which kind of blew my mind this morning.
1:26.2	I'm wondering first if you could just
1:28.5	remind us what ProPublica is and what its mission is. Yeah, so we are in investigative journalism
1:35.3	nonprofit. We basically specialize in going deep and taking the time to unearth totally new information and explain it with as much context as
1:48.3	possible. So yeah, that's basically all we do, investigative reporting. Yeah, and so part of your
1:54.3	investigations have involved IRS files. The title of this series that you guys have been publishing is the secret IRS files.
2:04.2	And it looks at how some of the wealthiest people in the country are able to utilize the tax code here in America to pay taxes at a rate well below the level that ordinary citizens pay.
	...

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