America's Largest Companies Dodged Nearly $300 Billion In Taxes, Report Finds

The country’s largest companies dodged more than $276 billion in federal corporate income taxes from 2018 to 2022, a new report from the nonprofit Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy finds.

The report examined corporate income taxes paid by 342 of the country’s largest companies from 2018 to 2022, the latest year for which companies have reported their earnings. All of them were profitable in all five years covered by the report.

Yet the vast majority used loopholes and special tax breaks to pay an effective federal income tax rate well below 21%, the rate they were required to pay on paper. And 109 — or nearly one out of every three — found a way to pay zero federal income taxes in at least one year out of the five. Those same 109 corporations scored $14.34 billion in federal tax rebates over the five year period.

The findings underscore that the 21% corporate tax rate is “a fiction,” said Matt Gardner, the lead author and an ITEP senior fellow — particularly for huge multinationals.

“The companies most successful at doing this international tax evasion dance… have a roomful of lawyers and accountants whose job it is to redefine taxable income, to move income around on paper in a way you hope will avoid taxes.”

Giants like AT&T, Bank of America, Citigroup, Duke Energy, FedEx, General Motors, Molson Coors, Netflix and T-Mobile enjoyed an effective rate of less than 5%. The industries paying the smallest overall tax rates were utilities, fossil fuel companies, car makers, and telecom companies.

All told, the companies in the study paid an average federal income tax rate of 14.1%. But just 25 of them gobbled up $155 billion of the total $276 billion saved by avoiding their full tax bill.

Major companies have