Large American companies evaded billions of dollars in taxes, including Amazon and FedEx!

It is learned that according to foreign media reports, according to data from the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy (ITEP), now at least 55 large US companies have not paid corporate income tax for 2020, including Amazon, Whirlpool, FedEx, Nike, HP and Salesforce, etc.

According to ITEP data, these 55 companies paid a total of $8.5 billion in taxes, but they received $3.5 billion in tax refunds. Combined with other tax evasion activities, in total, these companies cost the US government approximately $12 billion in 2021.

Data shows that Amazon is required to pay $79 billion in income taxes between 2018 and 2021, but in reality, Amazon only paid $4 billion in these four years, equivalent to an annual effective tax rate of 5.1%, about a quarter of the federal corporate tax rate of 21%, far below the proportion it needs to pay.

However, Amazon did not admit that it had evaded taxes. Amazon previously issued a statement: "In 2021, we paid a total of $2.3 billion in corporate income taxes, $5.2 billion in other federal taxes, and more than $4 billion in various state and local taxes. We also collected an additional $22 billion in sales taxes for U.S. states and localities."

“If even large, for-profit corporations don’t pay income taxes, then American business will face a serious unfairness problem,” said Matthew Gardner, a senior fellow at ITEP.

According to reports, these companies are very sophisticated and can perfectly evade taxes to make it legal. Chye-Ching Huang, executive director of the New York University Tax Law Center, said: "On average, large American companies cause the government to lose $180 billion each year, while the US government only receives $370 billion in taxes."

It is worth noting that ITEP also exposed Whirlpool's tax evasion method: the company registered a shell company in Mexico and transferred its Mexican business to the shell company, but the owner of the company was not Whirlpool, but a company with only one employee. Finally, it took advantage of loopholes between the tax systems of the United States, Mexico and Luxembourg to evade taxes.

Editor ✎ Nicole/

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