WASHINGTON (Bloomberg) — Congress, which over the past six years has repeatedly cut taxes on US companies, now wants some of the money back.And one of the ways they are considering is to extend US taxation to US companies’ international operations in low-tax jurisdictions like Bermuda.

Some Democrats, who now control both the House of Representatives and the US Senate, have proposed a severe clampdown on what they see as tax avoidance.

Senator Byron Dorgan, a North Dakota Democrat, wants to raise $15 billion over the next decade by defining US business operations in more than 30 foreign tax havens as domestic operations.

“We ought to shut that scam down,” said Dorgan, 64.

His office points to a 2004 Government Accountability Office report that found at least 59 of the 100 largest publicly traded federal contractors had subsidiaries in 39 countries and jurisdictions defined as tax havens. Among them: Altria Group Inc. and Boeing Co. The GAO did not attempt to determine whether the companies were there to avoid taxes.

Dawn Schneider, a spokeswoman for New York-based Altria, maker of Philip Morris cigarettes, said it was “merely happenstance” that the company had subsidiaries in countries listed as tax havens. Chicago-based Boeing didn’t respond to requests for comment.

Paul Schmidt, a former staffer on Congress’s Joint Committee on Taxation who is now a tax lawyer at the Washington firm Baker Hostetler, predicted lawmakers will look for corporate tax breaks that are easy to characterise as abusive. That, he said, will enable them to portray themselves as cracking down on waste, fraud and abuse, rather than raising taxes.

“Tax breaks that look abusive are politically easy targets,” Schmidt said.

Lawmakers may also raise revenue by trimming federal subsidies to student-loan providers such as SLM Corp., or Sallie Mae; paring Medicare payments to managed-care providers such as Humana Inc.; and rescinding tax breaks for energy companies such as Exxon Mobil Corp.

Democrats need tens of billions of dollars to make good on their campaign promises to spend more, tax families less and still balance the federal budget by 2012. Companies are emerging as the most politically expedient source for those funds.

“It’s strictly political,” said Bill Archer, 79, a former Republican chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee who is now a partner at PricewaterhouseCoopers LLP in Washington. “It’s much easier to raise taxes on businesses than it is on individuals.”

Companies that provide student loans were among the first targets of lawmakers. In January, the House approved a Democratic proposal to cut interest rates on student loans by half. Lawmakers financed the plan by cutting $6 billion in subsidies to the nation’s 32 biggest loan providers, including New York-based Citibank Inc., the world’s biggest financial-services company, and Reston, Virginia-based Sallie Mae, the largest US provider of student loans.

Since then, the Bush administration has called for slicing subsidies to all lenders by $18 billion. The companies fear that Senate Democrats, who haven’t taken up the issue, now have the political cover to pursue large cuts, said Brett Lief, president of the National Council of Higher Education Loan Programmes, a Washington-based trade group that represents lenders such as Citigroup and Sallie Mae.

Industry representatives have met with lawmakers in hopes of persuading them to look elsewhere for revenue. “They’re going to work their butts off to try to have these cuts reduced,” Lief said. Citigroup and Sallie Mae didn’t respond to requests for comment.