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A Dirty Dozen of Big Corporations That Underpay Their Taxes, Overpay Their Executive & Shareholders, and Otherwise Harm The Public Good

Much like billionaires and other super-rich individuals, massive corporations in the U.S. have spent years pushing for legislation to lower their taxes. In 2017, the Trump-GOP Tax law cut the corporate tax rate by two-fifths, from 35% to 21%. Despite promises from the law’s promoters that corporations would use their tax savings to boost worker pay, the reality has been that it primarily went to top executives and wealthy shareholders. 

Americans for Tax Fairness tracks not only the taxes paid by huge firms, but other important metrics as well, such as CEO pay and stock buybacks. These large corporations are hugely profitable, yet many continue to lobby for even lower tax rates, while simultaneously buying back record amounts of their own stock, increasing the pay of their executives, and oftentimes laying off employees. Profits that could be used to pay taxes, increase workers’ wages and provide ample healthcare and childcare to employees instead repeatedly wind up going to lobbying firms and making the richest executives and shareholders even richer. 

Following are a “dirty dozen” of big corporations that exemplify the interconnectivity of corporate misbehavior.  None of these very famous and very profitable firms paid anything near the statutory corporate tax rate of 21% over the first five years of the Trump law: most paid less than half that rate, and two paid nothing at all and instead got refunds. They’ve each provided their top executives with excessive salaries and spent millions of dollars lobbying the federal government. They pay their rank-and-file workers too little and charge their customers too much. In other words, they use their profits and power to keep their taxes low so they can use their cash to pursue private policies that are bad for our civic health. This disappointing but predictable result following the 2017 Trump tax law is one reason that raising the corporate tax rate is a popular idea—even among Republicans—as part of year-end tax legislation dealing with the expiration of other parts of the law.

Read full report here.