#tax dodging

[wouldyourfavepaychildsupport]

Would Tax Dodging pay Child Support?

Yes

No

Voting ended onMar 6, 2025

[tomorrowusa]

America’s Tax-Dodging CEOs Are at It Again

A new study reveals a staggering number of companies pay their CEOs more than they pay in taxes.

Corporations pay their CEOs extravagantly while trying to cheat on taxes.

It would be one thing if, alongside the exorbitant executive pay, the quality of American CEO-ing was going up. But these executives are making off with bigger bags of boodle despite their persistent incompetence: Media executives keep running their businesses into the ground, tech firms are laying people off because of vibes, the planes keep nearly crashing, and examples of insane eye-popping greed—like Rite-Aid’s decision to claw back severance paid out to laid-off workers on the same day they handed their CEO a $20 million bonus—keep on coming. So it may come as no surprise that there’s a robust connection between the overindulged CEOs and the firms that are most flagrantly dodging their fair share of taxes. For a report released Wednesday, the Institute for Policy Studies teamed up with Americans for Tax Fairness to spelunk into the balance sheets at some of America’s best-known tax scofflaws between 2018 and 2022. What they found was pretty consistent: The firms took home high profits and lavished their top executives with exorbitant pay, all while stiffing Uncle Sam. The excess is stunning. “For over half (35) of these corporations,” the study reports, “their payouts to top corporate brass over that entire span exceeded their net tax payments.” An additional 29 firms managed this feat for “at least two of the five years in the study period.” Eighteen firms paid a grand total of zero dollars during that five-year span, 17 of which were given tax refunds. All in all, the 64 companies in the report “posted cumulative pre-tax domestic profits of $657 billion” during the study period, but “paid an average effective federal tax rate of just 2.8 percent (the statutory rate is 21 percent) while paying their executives over $15 billion.” Which firms are the worst of the worst? You can probably guess the company that tops the list because it’s the one run by The New Republic’s 2023 Scoundrel of the Year. During the five years of the study, Tesla took home $4.4 billion in profits as CEO Elon Musk carted off $2.28 billion in stock options, which, since his 2018 payday, have ballooned to nearly $56 billion—a compensation plan so outlandish that the Delaware Court of Chancery canceled it. Tesla has, during that same period of time, paid an effective tax rate of zero percent through a combination of carrying forward losses from unprofitable years and good old-fashioned offshore tax dodging.

Elon Musk is either the world's richest or second richest person. But he still wants more. Give him credit for pathological greed.

In all fairness, Musk is not alone when it comes to enriching himself while screwing workers.

What sort of innovations have these CEOs wrought from this well-remunerated period? T-Mobile’s Mike Sievert presided over the Sprint merger that led to $23.6 million in stock buybacks and 5,000 layoffs. Netflix’s Reed Hastings poured $15 billion in profit into jacking up subscription rates. Nextera Energy has devoted $10 million in dark money in a “ghost candidate scheme” to thwart climate change candidates. Darden Restaurants has been fighting efforts to raise the minimum wage. Metlife has been diverting government money meant to fund low-cost housing into other, unrelated buckraking ventures. And some First Energy executives from the study period are embroiled in a corruption scandal that’s so massive that even Musk might find it to be beyond the pale.

These oligarchs are going to spend lavishly to elect Republicans who would give them even bigger tax breaks.

Fortunately, they can't literally buy votes. If we return to old school grassroots precinct work then we can thwart the MAGA Republican puppets of billionaire oligarchs.

One to one contact is a more important factor than TV or online ads in convincing people to vote your way. It takes more effort, but democracy was not built by slacktivism in the first place.

[themancorialist]

Piccadilly Gardens, Manchester.

[intelligentchristianlady]

Sadly, the IRS can't afford to go after the rich--they have more and better tax lawyers, and they can afford to keep litigating for years.

[coolfayebunny]

Blimey that’s a shock ain’t it ?

[aunti-christ-ine]

“The truth is that we have a rigged tax code that has essentially legalized tax dodging for large corporations.”

[justinspoliticalcorner]

IRS to Focus on Tax-Dodging Millionaires Instead of 'Working-Class Taxpayers'

The IRS says it recently completed a "top-to-bottom review of enforcement efforts," and will focus on high earners with huge tax debts.

Matt Keeley at NCRM:

The IRS announced that its enforcement system will change its focus from going after average and low-income taxpayers to millionaires and corporations who owe hundreds of thousands of dollars in tax debt. The change follows a recent “top-to-bottom review of enforcement efforts,” the IRS said Friday. In addition to focusing on “high-income” cases of people earning more than $1 million a year with over $250,000 in tax debt, the agency said it was increasing safeguards for people receiving the Earned Income Tax Credit, one of the government’s largest antipoverty programs.

“This new compliance push makes good on the promise of the Inflation Reduction Act to ensure the IRS holds our wealthiest filers accountable to pay the full amount of what they owe,” said IRS Commissioner Danny Werfel. “The years of underfunding that predated the Inflation Reduction Act led to the lowest audit rate of wealthy filers in our history.” The Biden administration’s Inflation Reduction Act, passed in August 2022, gave the agency $80 billion. Prior to the Inflation Reduction Act, funding for the IRS had been cut repeatedly since 2010, according to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. During former President Donald Trump’s term, additional cuts were made, even over the objections of Trump’s Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin. During Trump’s administration, the number of IRS agents had been cut by a third from 2010 levels, according to a 2018 ProPublica investigation, with the number of auditors reaching levels not seen since the early 1950s.

The IRS will finally focus on the REAL tax cheats: the wealthy tax dodgers instead of the working class folk.