$1 Billion: That’s How Much Walmart Avoids Paying in Taxes Each Year Through Loopholes

[RiverLover]

$1 Billion: That’s How Much Walmart Avoids Paying in Taxes Each Year Through Loopholes
11/24/2014

This Black Friday, legions of shoppers will throng to their local Walmart in frenzied pursuit of holiday deals. But it turns out that Walmart has saved the sweetest deals for itself.

In a recent analysis of Walmart’s tax spending, Americans for Tax Fairness (ATF) found that the company “avoids $1 billion a year in taxes” through federal loopholes, and various political shenanigans drive this always-low tax rate: the big-box giant is absorbing government subsidies both directly and indirectly, through its retail operations as well as its ingenious accounting methods. Overall, the retail giant can evade taxes through overseas accounts, on one hand, and raid the public trust on the other by capitalizing on the benefits system.

The losers in Walmart’s tax scheme are the working-class consumers who think they’re getting a good deal by elbowing through the mob surrounding the Xbox floor display. They’re being secretly robbed as the country’s pre-eminent retailer shields hundreds of millions of dollars of revenue from the tax system through creative, perfectly legal strategies to reduce its liability.

One major way Walmart and other multinationals skirt tax obligations, ATF explains, is to funnel the money to an overseas location where it can be subject to “a gaping loophole known as ‘deferral.’?” The ability to park assets in other countries “gives corporations great incentive to earn profits offshore (or make it look like they are earned offshore)—often by moving jobs overseas.”...

http://www.thenation.com/blog/191209/1-billion-thats-how-much-walmart-avoids-paying-taxes-each-year-through-loopholes

This is not Patriotism. This is not 'Support Our Troops". This is in-your-face F U America.

[bigwillq]

1. That's disgusting.

This needs to stop.

[B Calm]

2. If only they would take that 1 billion and spread it out evenly with their employees,

the tax payers could all save money and many of the Walmart workers wouldn't need food stamps.

[Elmergantry]

5. 71 dollars more per employee per annum.

I love math.

But anyway..Seems like competitor Aldi's pays much better with benes, and they make good profits. Why cant Wal-Mart?

[progressoid]

10. $714.00

[HereSince1628]

3. Break-away wealthy ... we R not in this together.

Excused as 'just business' cheating the government is de rigueur for the elite.

Patriotism isn't stripping countrymen of their wealth.

[Rhiannon12866]

4. And yet their employees are food insecure!

With all that food on their shelves, why have they never thought of providing some of that for their employees, at least for the holidays?! Where I worked, they gave us a turkey for Christmas every year - and I worked in an office. Wal-Mart has them right on site! It's inexcusable that their employees are going hungry!

[Frustratedlady]

6. Add to that the cost to the taxpayers for food stamps, insurance and

welfare because they limit the hours and benefits their employees can get. We end up subsidizing the rest.

Criminal in my view.

[jwirr]

7. Wonder if that includes state and local taxes? I doubt it.

[SomethingFishy]

8. I saw an interview with Bono and he said something that struck me...

he said "When Americans see a big mansion on the hill they think "if I work hard and follow the rules one day I could own that mansion, where as the Irish see a Castle on a hill and they think "one day... I'm going to get that motherfucker"...

I think the Irish have it right.

[RiverLover]

9. LOL! I think so too. :-)

That is good.

[hugo_from_TN]

13. I think Americans do (some of them anyway).

[Dark n Stormy Knight]

11. So what! I heard some guy on welfare ate a lobster once.

I think his wife also got a manicure. Get your priorities straight!

[niyad]

12. a disgusted k and r