The biggest, most profitable American companies paid only a fraction of the taxes they would owe under the official corporate rate, according to a study released on Monday by the Government Accountability Office. http://www.nytimes.com/2013/07/02/business/big-companies-paid-a-fraction-of-corporate-tax-rate.html?ref=us Using deductions and legal loopholes, large corporations enjoyed a 12.6 percent tax rate far below the 35 percent tax that is the statutory rate imposed by the federal government on corporate profits. The findings come amid rising criticism of the tactics that some big companies use to lower their tax bills.   The report found that even when foreign, state, and local taxes were included, the tax rate of large companies rose only to 16.9 percent of total income, still well below the official 35 percent. “Some U.S. multinational corporations like to complain about the U.S. 35 percent statutory tax rate, but what they don’t like to admit is that hardly any of them pay anything close to it,” US Senator Carl Levin said in a statement. “The big gap between the U.S. statutory tax rate and what large, profitable U.S. corporations actually pay is due in large part to the unjustified loopholes and gimmicks that riddle our tax code.”
big companies are shouldering a smaller part of the overall tax burden than in the past. As a percentage of federal tax revenue, corporate taxes have fallen to 9 percent from more than 30 percent in the 1950s. Overall, corporations paid about $242 billion in federal taxes in 2012, compared to $1.1 trillion taxes paid by individual taxpayers.
“An individual’s or corporation’s tax rate shouldn’t be dependent on their ability to hire a tax lobbyist,” said US Senator Tom Coburn