So, good news and bad news. The good news is, oil megacorporation ExxonMobil had such a profitable year in 2009, it contributed $15 billion to the world’s tax coffers.
The bad news: Not a cent of that went to the IRS.
ExxonMobil, the world’s second-largest company, says it actually paid out 47 percent of its profits in taxes, but not to the good ol’ capitalist US of A. Says Forbes in a report on all the taxes of the US’s top 25 firms
Not that this should shock anybody. In 2008, the New York Times discovered that one in four of the US’s largest corporations regularly pay no income tax to the IRS, and billions are lost. Exxon’s not alone: The Forbes article points out that General Electric avoided paying any income tax last year on profits of $10.3 billion. In addition to offshore tax shelters, GE had another ace in the hole: It submitted a record-breaking 24,000-page tax return. God bless the IRS’s auditors; I’d have paid billions not to have to read that thing.
– from motherjones.com
But at the same time ExxonMobil is paying millions to fund anti-climate change groups.