The country’s largest companies dodged more than $276 billion in federal corporate income taxes from 2018 to 2022, a new report from the nonprofit Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy finds. Via HuffPost:
The report looks at corporate income taxes paid by 342 of the country’s largest companies from 2018 to 2022, the latest year for which companies have reported their earnings. All of them were profitable during that time period. Yet most of them used loopholes and special tax breaks to pay an effective income tax rate well below 21%, the minimum required rate. One hundred and nine found a way to pay zero federal income taxes in at least one year out of the five.
Those same 109 corporations scored $14.34 billion in federal tax rebates over the five year period.
Matt Gardner, the lead author and an ITEP senior fellow, said the findings demonstrate that the 21% corporate tax rate is “a fiction,” particularly for huge multinationals.
Giants like AT&T, Bank of America, Citigroup, Duke Energy, FedEx, General Motors, Molson Coors, Netflix and T-Mobile enjoyed an effective rate of less than 5%. The industries paying the smallest overall tax rates were (of course) utilities, fossil fuel companies, car makers, and telecom companies.
The average federal income tax rate they paid was 14.1%.
