Fortune 500 Companies - Smart Avoiders of US Income Tax - Study by Citizens for Tax Justice
AMERICAN Electric Power, Boeing, Dupont, Exxon Mobil, FedEx, General Electric, Honeywell International, IBM, United Technologies, Verizon Communications, Wells Fargo and Yahoo.
You must have heard all these names - they are just a dozen of the Fortune 500 mega corporations of US of A. During the last three years, they earned 171 Billion Dollars in profits but ended up paying a negative tax rate of 1.5 percent.
Citizens for Tax Justice, conducted a study of the taxes paid or rather not paid by major US Corporations.
The 12 corporations analyzed are major, nationally recognized companies in a range of industries, including manufacturing, energy, services, transportation, high tech and finance. They all made significant profits in 2010 and over the 2008-10 period. These 12 companies reported USD 171 billion in pretax U.S. profits. But as a group, their federal income taxes were negative: - USD 2.5 billion.
Not a single one of the companies paid anything close to the 35 percent statutory tax rate. In fact, the “highest tax” company in the list, Exxon Mobil, paid an effective three-year tax rate of only 14.2 percent. That's 60 percent below the 35 percent rate that companies are supposed to pay.
And over the past two years, Exxon Mobil's net tax on its USD 9.9 billion in U.S. pre-tax profits was a minuscule USD 39 million, an effective tax rate of only 0.4 percent
Had these 12 companies paid the full 35 percent corporate tax, their federal income taxes over the three years would have totalled USD 59.9 billion. Instead, they enjoyed so many tax subsidies that they paid USD 62.4 billion less than that.
If just these 12 companies had paid at a 35 percent tax rate over the past three years, total federal revenues from corporate taxes would have been 12 percent higher than they actually were.
Citizens for Tax Justice and 250 organizations from all 50 states with constituencies across America have signed a letter to Congress stating that “most, if not all, of the revenue saved from eliminating corporate tax subsidies should go towards deficit reduction and towards creating the healthy, educated workforce and sound infrastructure that will make our nation more competitive”