The foreign RIC provisions mitigate tax inefficiencies to foreign
shareholders for a RIC’s U.S. source income, but the failure to adopt look-
through for foreign source income means that many RICs continue to be
tax-inefficient investment vehicles for foreign investors. The current regime
is thus inconsistent with the pass-through nature of RIC taxation,
unnecessarily penalizes foreign investors in global RICs, and deprives the
United States of tax revenue from RIC-related income, such as trading and
management fees. Although treaty shopping may have been the primary
rationale for not adopting pass-through for foreign source income, those
concerns are largely illusory: a foreign investor potentially only benefits
from a treaty between the United States and the source country if there is no
residence taxation or the residence country does not credit U.S. taxes. By
limiting look-through to treaty residents, a clearly second-best option, treaty
shopping concerns should be entirely ameliorated and foreign investment in
U.S. RICs facilitated.