Recent Reports

  • Apple Is Not Alone

    Recent Congressional hearings on the international tax-avoidance strategies pursued by the Apple corporation documented the company's strategy of shifting U.S. profits to offshore tax havens. But Apple is hardly the only major corporation that appears to be engaging in offshore-tax sheltering: seventeen other Fortune 500 corporations disclose information, in their financial reports, that strongly suggests they have paid little or no tax on their offshore holdings.

    06/02/2013

  • Presentation: Nuts & Bolts of Tax Reform

    This presentation was given to the United Church of Christ, Office of Justice & Witness, and the Presbyterian Church (USA), Office of Public Witness.

    05/31/2013

  • Apple Holds Billions of Dollars in Foreign Tax Havens

    An analysis of Apple Inc.'s financial reports makes clear that Apple has paid almost no income taxes to any country on its $102 billion in offshore cash holdings. That means that this cash hoard reflects profits that were shifted, on paper, out of countries where the profits were actually earned into foreign tax havens.

    05/20/2013

  • State-by-State Figures on Obama's Proposal to Limit Tax Expenditures

    President Obama has proposed to limit the tax savings for high-income taxpayers from itemized deductions and certain other deductions and exclusions to 28 cents for each dollar deducted or excluded. This proposal would raise more than half a trillion dollars in revenue over the up­coming decade. Despite this large revenue gain, only 3.6 percent of Americans would receive a tax increase under the plan in 2014, and their average tax increase would equal just less than one percent of their income.

    04/29/2013

  • Executive-Pay Tax Break Saved Fortune 500 Corporations $27 Billion Over the Past Three Years

    Earlier this year, Citizens for Tax Justice reported that Facebook Inc. had used a single tax break, for executive stock options, to avoid paying even a dime of federal and state income taxes in 2012. Since then, CTJ has investigated the extent to which other large companies are using the same tax break. This short report presents data for 280 Fortune 500 corporations that, like Facebook, disclose a portion of the tax benefits they receive from this tax break.

    04/23/2013

  • Bernie Sanders Is Right and the Tax Foundation Is Wrong: The U.S. Has Very Low Corporate Income Taxes

    Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont recently appeared on Real Time with Bill Maher and disputed the claim by the Tax Foundation that the U.S. has the highest corporate tax in the world. Senator Sanders is right, the Tax Foundation is wrong.

    04/23/2013

  • Six Things You Need to Know on Tax Day

    The critical facts you need to know about our tax system.

    04/15/2013

  • President Obama's Tax Proposals in his Fiscal 2014 Budget Plan

    President Obama has proposed some very modest changes in federal taxes in his Fiscal 2014 budget plan. Over the upcoming decade, the President's proposal would boost total federal revenues by only $851 billion. That's less than a 3 percent increase.

    04/11/2013

  • Ten (of Many) Reasons Why We Need Corporate Tax Reform

    This CTJ report illustrates how profitable Fortune 500 companies in a range of sectors of the U.S. economy have been remarkably successful in manipulating the tax system to avoid paying even a dime of tax on billions of dollars in profits. These ten corporations' tax situations shed light on the widespread nature of corporate tax avoidance. As a group, the ten companies paid no federal income tax on $16 billion in profits in 2012, and they paid zero federal income tax on $57 billion in profits over the past five years. All but one paid less than zero federal income tax in 2012; all paid exceedingly low rates over five years.

    04/10/2013

  • The U.S. Continues to Be One of the Least Taxed of the Developed Countries

    The U.S. was the third least taxed country in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) in 2010, the most recent year for which OECD has complete data. Of all the OECD countries, which are essentially the countries the U.S. trades with and competes with, only Chile and Mexico collect less taxes as a percentage of their overall economy (as a percentage of gross domestic product, or GDP).

    04/08/2013

  • Who Pays Taxes in America in 2013?

    America's tax system is just barely progressive even after the fiscal cliff deal's effects. Claims that the rich pay a disproportionate share of taxes often focus only on the federal personal income tax and ignore the other taxes that people pay, like federal payroll taxes, federal excise taxes, and state and local taxes.

    04/01/2013

  • New Tax Laws in Effect in 2013 Have Modest Progressive Impact

    The deal approved by Congress on New Years Day to address the "fiscal cliff" does not require the richest Americans to pay a disproportionate share of taxes, despite common claims that it does. The deal resulted in a tax system that is modestly more progressive than the one we would have if Congress had simply extended all of the tax laws in effect in 2012.

    04/01/2013

  • Who Loses Which Tax Breaks Under President Obama's Proposed Limit on Tax Expenditures?

    President Obama has proposed to limit the tax savings for wealthy taxpayers from itemized deductions and certain other deductions and exclusions to 28 cents for each dollar deducted or excluded. This proposal would raise more than half a trillion dollars in revenue over the up­coming decade. Despite this large revenue gain, only 2.4 percent of Americans would receive a tax increase under the plan in 2014, and their average tax increase would equal just 1 percent of their income. The deduction for state and local taxes would make up over a third of the total tax expenditures limited by the proposal. In combination, the deduction for state and local taxes and the deduction for charitable giving would make up more than half of the tax expenditures limited.

    03/29/2013

  • Paul Ryan's Latest Budget Plan Would Give Millionaires a Tax Cut of $200,000 or More

    House Budget Chairman Paul Ryan's budget plan for fiscal year 2014 and beyond includes a specific package of tax cuts (including reducing income tax rates to 25 percent and 10 percent) and no details on how Congress would offset their costs, all the while proposing to maintain the level of revenue that will be collected by the federal government under current law. Under Ryan's plan taxpayers with income exceeding $1 million in 2014 would receive an average net tax decrease of over $200,000 that year even if they had to give up all of their tax expenditures.

    03/13/2013

  • Apple, Microsoft and Eight Other Corporations Each Increased Their Offshore Profit Holdings by $5 Billion or More in 2012

    In recent years, multinational U.S.-based corporations have systematically accumulated staggering amounts of profits offshore. Much if not most of these profits were actually earned in the United States but have been artificially shifted to foreign tax havens to avoid U.S. corporate income taxes.

    03/11/2013

  • Facebook's Multi-Billion Dollar Tax Break: Executive-Pay Tax Break Slashes Income Taxes on Facebook-- and Other Fortune 500 Companies

    Earlier this month, the Facebook Inc. released its first "10-K" annual financial report since going public last year. Hidden in the report's footnotes is an amazing admission: despite $1.1 billion in U.S. profits in 2012, Facebook did not pay even a dime in federal or state income taxes.

    02/14/2013

  • CTJ's 2013 Tax Calculator

    Citizens for Tax Justice has an online calculator that will tell you what you'd pay in federal taxes in 2013 under three different scenarios.

    02/06/2013

  • Derivatives Proposal from Top House Tax-Writer Could Improve Tax Code -- if the Revenue Is Not Used for Rate Cuts

    In recent weeks, Dave Camp of Michigan, the Republican chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee, released tax proposals related to the complex world of derivatives that would have real benefits -- if Camp was not proposing to use all the resulting revenue savings to offset cuts in tax rates. Congress instead should consider enacting these proposals and using the revenue to protect and preserve programs like Medicare that are increasingly targeted for self-destructive cuts.

    02/04/2013

  • Working Paper on Tax Reform Options

    End Tax Sheltering of Investment Income and Corporate Profits and Limit Tax Breaks for the Wealthy: There are at least three major categories of tax reforms Congress could pursue to raise revenue. They include ending tax breaks and loopholes that allow wealthy individuals to shield their investment income from taxation, and ending breaks and loopholes that allow large, profitable corporations to shift their profits offshore to avoid U.S. taxes, and limiting the ability of wealthy individuals to use itemized deductions and exclusions to lower their taxes.

    02/04/2013

  • Congressional Research Service Finds Evidence of Massive Tax Avoidance by U.S. Corporations Using Tax Havens

    A new report from the non-partisan Congressional Research Service (CRS) finds that U.S. corporations report a huge share of their profits as officially earned in small, low-tax countries where they have very little investment and workforce while reporting a much smaller percentage of their profits in larger, industrial countries where they actually have massive investments and workforces.

    01/25/2013

 

 

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