tagged w/ Corporate Tax
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The corporate tax rate in the U.S. is 35%, but there aren't many companies that end up paying that amount. According to a study by the Citizens for Tax Justice and the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy, the average tax rate of 280 S&P 500 companies investigated was 18.5% between 2008 and 2010.
Over 70 companies paid no taxes at all.
And then there were the 30 companies that paid less than nothing — we have those for you here.
But first, here's how they get away with it (from the report):
1. Accelerated depreciation: "The tax laws generally allow companies to write off their capital investments considerably faster than the assets actually wear out. This “accelerated depreciation” is technically a tax deferral, but so long as a company continues to invest, the tax deferral tends to be indefinite."
2. Stock options: Most big corporations give their executives (and sometimes other employees) options to buy the company’s stock at a favorable price in the future. When those options are exercised, companies can take a tax deduction for the difference between what the employees pay for the stock and what it’s worth (while employees report this difference as taxable wages). Paying executives with options took off in the mid-1990s, in part because this kind of compensation was exempt from a law enacted in 1993 that tried to reduce income inequality by limiting corporate deductions for executive pay to $1 million per executive.
3. Industry-specific tax breaks. The federal tax code also provides tax subsidies to companies that engage in certain activities.
4.Offshore tax sheltering: Over the past decade or so, corporations and their accounting firms have become increasingly aggressive in seeking ways to shift their U.S. profits, on paper, into offshore tax havens, in order to avoid their U.S. tax obligations.
It's also worth pointing out two things: 2008-2009 were strange, anomalous years in corporate history due to the severity of the crisis AND these companies will all counter and say they paid tons of taxes that weren't necessarily income taxes.
So we must ask ourselves; are we going broke because of a spending problem or because of reduced revenue?
http://www.businessinsider.com/these-are-the-30-american-companies-that-paid-less-than-zero-income-tax-from-2008-2010-2011-11?op=1The corporate tax rate in the U.S. is 35%, but there aren't many companies that... more
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Earlier this year, Berkshire Hathaway Chairman Warren Buffett made headlines by
publicly decrying the stark inequity between his own effective federal tax rate (about
17 percent, by his estimate) and that of his secretary (about 30 percent). The resulting
media firestorm has drawn welcome attention to unfair tax breaks that allow the richest
Americans to avoid paying their fair share of the personal income tax. But these inequities are not limited to the personal tax.
Our corporate tax system is plagued by very similar problems, problems that allow many of America’s most profitable corporations to pay little or nothing in federal income taxes.
This study takes a hard look at the federal income taxes paid or not paid by 280 of
America’s largest and most profitable corporations in 2008, 2009 and 2010. The companies in our report are all from Fortune’s annual list of America’s 500 largest corporations, and all of them were profitable in each of the three years analyzed. Over the three years, the 280 companies in our survey reported total pretax U.S. profits of $1.4 trillion.
You think you are angry now? Wait until you read this.
http://www.ctj.org/corporatetaxdodgers/CorporateTaxDodgersReport.pdfEarlier this year, Berkshire Hathaway Chairman Warren Buffett made headlines by... more
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Americans like to trumpet the belief that we’re a “nation of laws”. Unfortunately, our laws are unevenly enforced when enforced at all. Congress churns out dozens of laws every year, while at the same time, guaranteeing they’ll fail by not budgeting for enforcement. Tea partiers like to say that most corporate laws constitute “over-regulation”. However, one could make a reasonable case that we don’t over-regulate, we under-enforce – and a law unenforced is no law at all.Americans like to trumpet the belief that we’re a “nation of laws”.... more
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The Dutch Company Than Pays A Royalty.That Irish/Bermudan holding company sublicenses the IP to a Dutch company, which in turn sublicenses the IP back to another Irish company, which is an operating company wholly owned by the Irish/Bermudan holding company.The Dutch Company Than Pays A Royalty.That Irish/Bermudan holding company sublicenses... more
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