"American Taxpayers Increasingly Picking Up the Tab for Unpaid Corporate Taxes"
American Taxpayers Increasingly Picking Up the Tab for Unpaid Corporate Taxes
Scott Klinger at the Contributor
http://thecontributor.com/economy/american-taxpayers-increasingly-picking-tab-unpaid-corporate-taxes
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Officially, the U.S. corporate tax rate stands at 35 percent, but in practice its far lower. Corporations have lots of tricks in their box of tax-avoidance tools.
In the 1950s, corporations paid nearly a third of the federal governments bills. Last year, thanks to the antics of Pfizer and other examples of overly creative accounting, corporate income taxes accounted for less than a tenth of Uncle Sams total revenue.
Consider Pfizers track record. The drugmaker increased its offshore profits by $10 billion in 2012, boosting its offshore stash to $73 billion all of it untaxed by Uncle Sam. Like most pharmaceutical companies, Pfizer registers its patents in a low-tax offshore haven, and then charges a high price for the use of this intellectual property. Doing so, it shifts all of its U.S. profits offshore, avoiding U.S. taxes and bloating its overseas bank account.
Pfizers tax dodging prowess has earned it a gold medal in the sport, but it has also drawn unwanted attention from the Securities and Exchange Commission. The SEC wrote to Pfizer last year asking them to explain four years of large losses in their U.S. operations despite reporting about 40 percent of their sales on American soil. Undeterred by the SEC investigation, Pfizer added a fifth year of U.S. losses to the string in 2012.
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