Corporate Tax Cheats by the Numbers

Apple isn’t the only major American corporation hiding profits abroad. Lauren Feeney at the Moyers & Company blog has assembled a list of 10 companies that paid little to no taxes last year, and another 10 that added at least $5 billion to their offshore tax havens.

The U.S. corporate tax rate is 35 percent — one of the highest in the world — but as The New York Times reported yesterday, the effective corporate tax rate (what companies actually pay) “fell to 17.8 percent in 2012 from 42.5 percent in 1960,” according to the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis. Another chart from the Citizens for Tax Justice shows 10 companies that managed to do much better than average, paying little or no taxes for the past five years. Dollar amounts are numbers in millions and “rate” is the effective tax rate that the companies paid.

See the charts here.

— Posted by Peter Z. Scheer.