Thread: G.E. paid no taxes on $5.1 billion in profits

G.E. paid no taxes on $5.1 billion in profits
By Brett Michael Dykes Fri Mar 25, 11:24 am ET

As Washington worries about the United States' growing deficit problem, there's mounting evidence the government is failing to collect taxes from wealthy individuals and corporations. A piece in today's New York Times by David Kocieniewski outlines how G.E. skirted paying any taxes on $5.1 billion in profits in 2010--in addition to claiming a $3.2 billion tax credit.

The main reason G.E. is so adept at avoiding paying taxes, Kocieniewski writes, is because it's compiled an all-star team of in-house tax professionals plucked from the Internal Revenue Service, the Treasury Department, and "virtually all the tax-writing committees in Congress."

G.E.-- whose slogan is "Imagination at Work"-- has in-house, Kocieniewski writes, what is considered by many to be the best tax law firm in the world. Their secret to success is a familiar one, though G.E. appears to have perfected it: "fierce lobbying for tax breaks and innovative accounting that enables it to concentrate its profits offshore."

Writes Kocieniewski: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/25/bu...pagewanted=all

G.E.’s Strategies Let It Avoid Taxes Altogether

General Electric, the nation’s largest corporation, had a very good year in 2010.

The company reported worldwide profits of $14.2 billion, and said $5.1 billion of the total came from its operations in the United States.

Its American tax bill? None. In fact, G.E. claimed a tax benefit of $3.2 billion.

>snip<

In a regulatory filing just a week before the Japanese disaster put a spotlight on the company's nuclear reactor business, G.E. reported that its tax burden was 7.4 percent of its American profits, about a third of the average reported by other American multinationals. Even those figures are overstated, because they include taxes that will be paid only if the company brings its overseas profits back to the United States. With those profits still offshore, G.E. is effectively getting money back.

Such strategies, as well as changes in tax laws that encouraged some businesses and professionals to file as individuals, have pushed down the corporate share of the nation's tax receipts — from 30 percent of all federal revenue in the mid-1950s to 6.6 percent in 2009.

In an interesting twist, President Obama recently asked G.E. CEO Jeffrey Immelt to be his chief outside economic adviser, and the company recently came under fire for being the manufacturer of the faulty reactors that sparked Japan's nuclear crisis in the wake of the devastating earthquake and tsunami.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/yblog_theloo...ion-in-profits

No wonder the country is going broke

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Of course not, taxes are for the middle class and aspiring wealthy -- the big boys can afford to hire the best talent to make sure they don't pay any themselves.

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In the U.S.A. we have a anti-populous Corporatocracy in which the government is run by multinational-corporations (such as GE) by buying Congresses and Presidencies with millions in campaign contributions (bribes), that are an extremely small portion of the billions of dollars in profits these multinational-corporations reap from their efforts at bribery.

It is anti-populous in that the tax-burden is shifted from the multinational corporations and their owners, the rich, to the middle class and the poor, or us working-people. Besides free-pass tax laws, corporate profits are enhanced in other ways, such anti-citizen efforts by your political representatives and trade agreements that shipped your jobs elsewhere. Deregulation efforts allow corporations to harm citizens and so-called "tort reform" that protects corporations from being sued when they do harm citizens. Collusion between the military the corporations and politicians bring on wars so that your tax dollars can be wasted needlessly by blowing things up (including your tax dollars) overseas.

The enemy of the people of the citizens of the U.S.A. is the current form of government under corporate control. Both Democrats and Republican collude in this travesty.

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Corporations are now considered to be People according tot he Supreme Court, so they should be taxed like People!

Then in the end we could all look at lower taxes.

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The IRS could eliminate half of the audits they do, while focusing on one company like GE, and still get more money in assessments. But they won't do that, because they are scared of GE, and are not smart enough to figure out how GE works. Instead, they will continue to audit small businesses and individuals, and scaring people into paying small fines and fees.

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... innovative accounting ...

In a smaller company it would be refered to as "cooking the books"; in an individual it would be cheating. For the wealthy - politicians and friends of politicians it is "an error" or an "innocent mistake"

I agree that the IRS is a mess ... but c'mon ... if a person tried these "creative accounting techniques" they would be under the jail because they can't pay the stable of lawyers that GE has on staff.

Might doesn't make "right" and just because some thing is "legal" doesn't make it ethical.