Thirteen days away, tick tock, tick tock...everyone is getting ready to write those checks to the IRS for the money they owe on income earned--you know, the ones that fund highways, education, health care and, grumble, war.
Except for corporations, of course. It's the same old story--dodge, dodge, dodge a fair share of taxes. $600 billion.
I've previously written about the stashing of trillions of dollars overseas to avoid taxes. This year, the update from Citizens for Tax Justice:
It’s been well documented that major U.S. multinational corporations are stockpiling profits offshore to avoid U.S. taxes. Congressional hearings over the past few years have raised awareness of tax avoidance strategies of major technology corporations such as Apple and Microsoft, but, as this report shows, a diverse array of companies are using offshore tax havens, including the pharmaceutical giant Amgen, the apparel manufacturer Nike, the supermarket chain Safeway, the financial firm American Express, banking giants Bank of America and Wells Fargo, and even more obscure companies such as Advanced Micro Devices and Group 1 Automotive.
All told, American Fortune 500 corporations are avoiding up to $600 billion in U.S. federal income taxes by holding more than $2.1 trillion of “permanently reinvested” profits offshore. In their latest annual financial reports, twenty-eight of these corporations reveal that they have paid an income tax rate of 10 percent or less in countries where these profits are officially held, indicating that most of these profits are likely in offshore tax havens.[emphasis in original]
And:
Hundreds of Other Fortune 500 Corporations Don’t Disclose Tax Rates They’d Pay if They Repatriated Their Profits
At the end of 2014, 304 Fortune 500 companies collectively held a whopping $2.15 trillion offshore. (A full list of these 304 corporations is published as an appendix to this paper.)
Clearly, the 28 companies that report the U.S. tax rate they would pay if they repatriated their profits are not alone in shifting their profits to low-tax havens—they’re only alone in disclosing it. The vast majority of these companies — 247 out of 304 —decline to disclose the U.S. tax rate they would pay if these offshore profits were repatriated. (57 corporations, including the 28 companies shown on this page, disclose this information. A full list of the 57 companies is published as an appendix to this paper.) The non-disclosing companies collectively hold $1.56 trillion in unrepatriated offshore profits at the end of 2014.
Accounting standards require publicly held companies to disclose the U.S. tax they would pay upon repatriation of their offshore profits — but these standards also provide a gaping loophole allowing companies to assert that calculating this tax liability is “not practicable.” Almost all of the 247 non-disclosing companies use this loophole to avoid disclosing their likely tax rates upon repatriation — even though these companies almost certainly have the capacity to estimate these liabilities.[emphasis in original]
Finally:
The limited disclosures made by a handful of Fortune 500 corporations show that corporations are brazenly using tax havens to avoid taxes on significant profits. But the scope of this tax avoidance is likely much larger, since the vast majority of Fortune 500 companies with offshore cash refuse to disclose how much tax they would pay on repatriating their offshore profits.[emphasis added]