Think you’re the only one struggling to pay your taxes this year? There are hundreds of companies who are in the same boat as you are. The only thing that separates them is that they’ve found a way to not pay taxes. They found opportunities within the tax codes to escape taxation on their income. The web of laws is intricate, but many famous companies have been able to use them to their advantage to report negative percentages in taxes from year to year. From 2008 to 2010, the following companies paid less than zero in taxes:
- General Electric (remember the company that received a bailout package) – General Electric paid -45.3% in taxes during that time,
- Computer Sciences paid -18.3%,
- American Electric Power paid -9.2%,
- Con-way paid -9.1%,
- Verizon Communications got away with -2.9%,
- Boeing paid -1.8%, and
- Famous Wells Fargo paid -1.4%
This is just a fraction of the total companies paying taxes in the negative amounts. These are just the most well-known. Many of these companies continued to pay negative percentages on their income taxes throughout 2011 as well. Who knows how many of them will
These percentages register a multi-billion dollar loss for the IRS for those three years. Most of these losses were due to the changing and adjusting of tax codes that are continually complicating the way taxes are calculated and collected each year. A system that changes this much makes for a lot of complications and opportunities for companies to capitalize on saving money. That can be a blessing for companies but a curse for the government to fund the projects it is working to operate. The constant changes are hard to keep track of and many companies miss out on opportunities to obtain tax deductions available to them from year to year.
Source: “Corporate Taxpayers & Corporate Tax Dodgers 2008-10,” a joint project of Citizens for Tax Justice and the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy. The Washington Post.Published on November 2, 2011, 8:38 p.m.