Alcohol company seeks 75% discount on taxes, files for bankruptcy

If you’ve bought any of the bottles in the picture in this story, or you purchased a drink at the bar with any of these spirits between 2015 and 2019, chances are who may have been screwed on its cost.

The fleecing of smokers, drinkers, and the people of Guam who are supposed to benefit from the sin taxes they pay continues.

Titan Imports, in a petition in the U.S. District Court of Guam for bankruptcy, recently revealed it self reported owing sin taxes (alcohol excise tax in this case) on alcohol sales between 2015 and 2019 of $2.5 million. The company proposed to the Guam Department of Revenue and Taxation to settle its tax debt for $600,000, or about a 75 percent discount. And that doesn’t take into consideration two factors: 1) whether the self-report of taxes owed in those five years is accurate, and 2) whether Titan Imports failed to remit taxes before 2015 or after 2019.

Wouldn’t you like a 75 percent tax discount? For many cigarette and alcohol distribution companies on Guam, it doesn’t matter. As Kandit has previously reported, several of these companies haven’t paid their fair share of taxes, an unfair trade practice considering their competitors are remitting their tax burden.

The proverbial salt on the wound is this: People who purchased cigarettes and alcohol products already paid the built-in sin taxes on those products. The taxes owed are taxes its customers already paid, and the distributor simply did not remit.

It is unknown whether Guam DRT accepted Titan’s proposal.

According to Titan’s filings in federal court, the company has $3 million in assets, including “cash at the Bank of Guam of approximately $366,244.62 and cash/securities at Merrill Lynch totaling approximately $1,713,758.00.”

Aside from its $2.5 million tax obligation to DRT, Titan reported to the court a $850,416.17 loan balance to the Bank of Guam and $484,219.08 “in secured debt owed to Merrill Lynch.”

As reported, Titan simply is the latest in a line of alcohol and cigarette distribution companies on island to be exposed for substantial tax liability on tax money these companies already collected from smokers and drinkers.