Corporate Tax Watch

  • blog   August 5, 2020

    Between the Lines: Amazon Q2 Report Hints It Will Avoid Taxes on This Year’s Record Profit Haul

    The House Judiciary Committee last week held an antitrust hearing to scrutinize Amazon and other tech companies’ growing dominance. A look at the online retail giant’s new quarterly report and past tax avoidance reveals why lawmakers should be equally concerned about how the tax system allows dominant, profitable corporations to avoid most or all federal tax on their profits.

    Amazon, yet again, is poised to pay little or no federal income tax on its record profits, and it appears likely to do so using entirely legal tax breaks for stock options and research and development.

  • blog   July 29, 2020

    Biden’s Minimum Corporate Tax Proposal: Yes, Please Limit Amazon’s Tax Breaks

    A large majority of Americans want corporations to pay more taxes and Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden has several proposals to achieve that. The newest idea is to require corporations to pay a minimum tax equal to 15 percent of profits they report to shareholders and to the public if this is less than what they pay under regular corporate tax rules. A recent article in the Wall Street Journal quotes several critics of the proposal, but none of their points are convincing.

  • blog   June 2, 2020

    White House Incredibly Still Believes Tax Cuts Are the Answer to America’s Problems

    White House officials continue to discuss tax cuts in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. Steve Wamhoff provides a roundup of these terrible ideas that would do little to boost investment or reach those who need it most.

  • report   June 2, 2020

    Depreciation Breaks Have Saved 20 Major Corporations $26.5 Billion Over Past Two Years

    The Trump administration and its congressional allies have proposed making permanent the expensing provision in the Trump-GOP tax law. Expensing is the most extreme form of accelerated depreciation, which allows businesses to deduct the cost of purchasing equipment more quickly than it wears out. But expensing and other types of accelerated depreciation already account for a very large share of corporate tax breaks and allows many companies to pay nothing at all.

  • blog   June 2, 2020

    Trump-GOP Tax Law Encourages Companies to Move Jobs Offshore–and New Tax Cuts Won’t Change That 

    New tax cuts to incentivize bringing jobs back to the United States will fail. No new tax provisions can be more generous than the zero percent rate the 2017 law provides for many offshore profits or the loopholes that allow corporations to shift profits to countries with minimal or no corporate income taxes.   

  • blog   May 20, 2020

    A Dimon Memo Will Buy You a Dime’s Worth of Social Change

    JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon, in a May 19 memo to employees, outlines steps the company is taking to help its customers, small businesses and communities stay afloat. The part…
  • blog   May 5, 2020

    The Price We Pay for Amazon in Its Prime

    There is every reason to believe that Amazon will continue its tax-avoidance ways in 2020. The entirely-legal tax avoidance tools the company used to zero out its federal income tax bills over the last three years remain entirely legal today. From accelerated depreciation to the research and development tax credit to the deduction for executive stock options, Amazon’s tax avoidance tools have been blessed by lawmakers, and presidents, of all stripes.

  • blog   April 29, 2020

    Pandemic Profits: Netflix’s Record Profit Haul, Past Tax Avoidance Raise Questions about Tax Law’s Weaknesses

    At a time when many companies are facing existential threats due to the COVID-19 pandemic and associated economic shutdown, it is vital to ensure that our corporate tax laws apply fairly to companies that are still turning a profit in these turbulent times.

  • blog   April 24, 2020

    Partying Like It’s 2017: How Congress Went Overboard on Helping Businesses with Losses  

    The Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security (CARES) Act provides some needed relief for individuals and families, but two arcane tax provisions related to business losses will further enrich the wealthy and fail to boost our economy more broadly.

  • blog   April 6, 2020

    Trump to Restaurant Owners: “Let Them Eat Skyboxes”

    Last week, President Trump destroyed everyone’s coronavirus press conference bingo card by announcing that a conversation he had with celebrity chef Wolfgang Puck inspired him to propose restoring a corporate tax deduction for business entertainment expenses. Trump’s own signature tax plan repealed this break two years ago.

  • blog   April 1, 2020

    Boeing “CARES” A Lot About its Shareholders—But What about the Rest of Us?

    The gigantic Coronavirus-related tax and spending bill enacted last week, the so-called “CARES Act,” sets aside $17 billion in loans for “businesses critical to maintaining national security.” It’s generally understood that the bill’s authors want much, if not all, of this $17 billion to go to a single company: Boeing. So it behooves us to ask whether Boeing benefits America and its economy in ways that merit this largesse.

  • blog   March 31, 2020

    Congress “CARES” for Wealthy with COVID-19 Tax Policy Provisions

    At a time when record numbers of Americans are facing unemployment, state and local governments are facing a perfect storm of growing public investment needs and vanishing tax revenues, and small business owners are struggling to avoid even more layoffs, lavishing tax breaks on the top 1 percent in this way shouldn’t be in anyone’s top 20 list of needed tax changes.

  • blog   March 10, 2020

    COVID-19 Is No Excuse for Airline Industry or Any Other Corporate Tax Cut

    Trump administration officials have reportedly floated the idea of including tax breaks for the airline industry in its package of COVID-19-related stimulus proposals, which would allow airline companies to defer income taxes into the future. This is an odd policy choice since most of the biggest airlines are already using deferral to zero out most or all of their federal income taxes on billions of dollars in profits.

  • blog   February 12, 2020

    Hearing Witness: Trump Administration Giving Tax Breaks Not Allowed by Law

    The Treasury Department, tasked with issuing regulations to implement the hastily drafted Trump-GOP tax law, is concocting new tax breaks that are not provided in the law. This is the short version of what we learned while watching Tuesday’s House Ways and Means Committee hearing on “The Disappearing Corporate Income Tax.”

  • blog   February 11, 2020

    Why Today’s Congressional Hearing on “The Disappearing Corporate Income Tax” Is Imperative

    The United States is collecting a historically low level of tax revenue from corporations. In 2018, corporate tax revenue as a share of gross domestic product (the nation’s economic output)…
  • blog   February 10, 2020

    President Trump’s 2021 Budget: Promises Made, Promises Broken

    President Trump has kept only one of his promises–his pledge to lower taxes for corporations and their investors.  

    The budget plan he released today again breaks his promise to reject cuts in Medicaid that would affect millions of people. His budget once again fails to eliminate the deficit, much the less the national debt, during his presidency as he promised. It cuts trillions from safety net programs and student aid programs despite his pledge to stand for forgotten Americans.  

  • blog   February 4, 2020

    Trump Already Did Tax Cuts 2.0… For Corporations

    If President Trump puts forth another tax proposal this year, as he is hinting, it will be his third. The second round, already costing the U.S. Treasury billions, was implemented largely out of the public’s view.

  • blog   January 31, 2020

    From 0% to 1.2%: Amazon Lauds Its Minuscule Effective Federal Income Tax Rate 

    If we focus on the taxes the company paid in 2019, we see an effective federal income tax rate of just 1.2 percent. And since the company enjoyed federal income tax rebates in 2017 and 2018, this means that over the last three years Amazon has paid zero on $29 billion of U.S. pretax income.

  • blog   January 24, 2020

    GOP Legacy on IRS Administration: Auditing Mississippi, not Microsoft

    Money doesn’t buy happiness—but it can buy immunity from the reach of Uncle Sam. The IRS is outgunned in cases against corporate giants because that’s how Republican leaders want it to be. They have systematically assaulted the agency’s enforcement capacity through decades of funding cuts. Instead of saving money, these cuts have cost billions: each dollar spent on the IRS results in several dollars of tax revenue collected.

  • blog   January 7, 2020

    Guilty, Not GILTI: Unclear Whether Corps Continue to Lower Their Tax Bills Via Tax Haven Abuse

    President Trump and GOP lawmakers often cited corporations’ abuse of tax havens, e.g. shifting profits offshore to avoid taxes, as justification for dramatically lowering the federal corporate tax rate under…
  • blog   December 19, 2019

    Corporate Tax Avoidance Is Mostly Legal—and That’s the Problem

    As usual, corporate spokespersons and their allies are trying to push back against ITEP’s latest study showing that many corporations pay little or nothing in federal income taxes. One way they respond is by stating that everything they do is perfectly legal. This is an attempt by the corporate world to change the subject. The entire point of ITEP’s study is that Congress has allowed corporations to avoid paying taxes, and that this must change.

  • blog   December 18, 2019

    Why Corporate Tax Avoidance Matters

    Corporate tax avoidance boosts companies’ bottom lines, and this benefits the owners of corporate stocks, which are mostly concentrated in the hands of the well-off. The cost of corporate tax dodging is borne by everyone, in several different ways.

  • blog   December 16, 2019

    More of the Same: Corporate Tax Avoidance Hasn’t Changed Much Under Trump-GOP Tax Law

    A new report from ITEP released today shows that, based on the first year of financial reports released by companies operating under the new tax law, tax avoidance appears to be every bit as much of a problem under the new tax system as it was before the Trump tax law took effect.

  • news release   December 16, 2019

    Fortune 500 Companies Avoided $73.9 Billion in Tax Under First Year of Trump Tax Law

    A comprehensive examination of Fortune 500 companies’ financial filings in 2018, the first year of the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, finds that the law did nothing to curb corporate tax avoidance, with 91 companies paying $0 in taxes on U.S. income in 2018 and profitable companies overall paying a collective effective tax rate of 11.3 percent, which is barely more than half the 21 percent rate established by the tax law, the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy (ITEP) said today.

  • report   December 16, 2019

    Corporate Tax Avoidance in the First Year of the Trump Tax Law

    Profitable Fortune 500 companies avoided $73.9 billion in taxes under the first year of the Trump-GOP tax law. The study includes financial filings by 379 Fortune 500 companies that were profitable in 2018; it excludes companies that reported a loss.