55 firms paid no federal income tax last year, report finds

Dozens of America’s biggest companies paid no federal income taxes last year thanks to a range of tax breaks — including some brand-new ones, a new report says.

The 55 corporations avoided a total of $8.5 billion in taxes on more than $40 billion in pre-tax profits in their most recent fiscal year, according to the Friday report from the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy.

In fact, 52 of those firms — including household names such as Nike, FedEx and Dish Network — ended up pocketing federal tax rebates worth a collective $3.5 billion, the left-leaning think tank’s analysis found.

And 26 of them haven’t paid a penny in federal income tax in the three years since the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act reform bill was signed into law in 2017, the report says. That group includes shipping giant FedEx and power company Duke Energy, which reported nearly $15 billion in pre-tax income for those three years, according to the findings.

“Duke Energy fully complies with federal and state tax laws as part of our efforts to make investments that will benefit our customers and communities,” company spokesperson Catherine Butler said, adding that Duke paid more than $2 billion in annual state and local taxes in 2020.

Major companies have used loopholes in federal tax law to help their bottom line for decades, the think tank’s researchers note. But they got a fresh boon from the CARES Act, the $2.2 trillion stimulus bill that aimed to help businesses weather the COVID-19 pandemic.

Big firms were able to take advantage of a provision in the bill to use losses they racked up in 2018 or 2019 to offset profits from previous years, which slashed some of their 2020 tax bills to less than zero, according to the report. That measure accounted for at least $500 million of the 55 giants’ tax breaks, the report says.

FedEx stood by the CARES Act tax breaks, saying the law helped it and other companies “navigate a rapidly changing economy and marketplace while continuing to invest in capital, hire team members, and fund employee pension plans.”

But many companies also used more established methods for giving themselves tax discounts.

Those include write-offs for paying executives in stock, which were used by more than a dozen companies, while at least half a dozen took federal research and experimentation credits, the report says.

The list included some companies hit hard by the pandemic, including crafts retailer Michaels, as well as companies that thrived despite the lockdowns, like Salesforce.com, the cloud computing company that announced record 2020 earnings in February.

By reining in tax breaks like those, “or by re-introducing some form of a ‘minimum tax’ requiring profitable companies to pay at least some tax in any profitable year, Congress and President Biden could take a major step toward a fairer and more sustainable tax system,” authors Matthew Gardner and Steve Wamhoff wrote in the report.

Salesforce, Michaels, Nike and Dish Network did not immediately respond to requests for comment.