[Home] [Headlines] [Latest Articles] [Latest Comments] [Post] [Mail] [Sign-in] [Setup] [Help] [Register]
Status: Not Logged In; Sign In
International News Title: How the World’s Biggest Corporation Secretly Uses Tax Havens to Dodge Taxes A groundbreaking report reveals that Walmart has built a vast, undisclosed network of 78 subsidiaries and branches in 15 overseas tax havens, which may be used to minimize foreign taxes where it has retail operations and to avoid U.S. tax on those foreign earnings. These secretive subsidiaries have never been subject to public scrutiny before. They have remained largely invisible, in part because Walmart fails to list them in its annual 10-K filings with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC). Walmarts preferred tax haven is Luxembourg, dubbed a magical fairyland for corporations looking to shelter profits from taxation. The report, The Walmart Web: How the Worlds Biggest Corporation Secretly Uses Tax Havens to Dodge Taxes, is the first-ever comprehensive documentation of the companys use of tax havens. The full report is available here, and for the reports Key Findings, click here. Most people know that Walmart is the worlds biggest corporation. Virtually no one knows that Walmart has an extensive and secretive web of subsidiaries located in countries widely known as tax havens. Typically, the primary purpose for a corporation to set up subsidiaries in tax havens where it has little to no business operations and few, if any, employees is to pay little, if any, taxes and to maintain financial secrecy. All told it has 78 subsidiaries and branches in 15 offshore tax havens, none of them publicly reported before. They have remained invisible to experts on corporate tax avoidance in part because of the way Walmart has filed information about them to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC). Walmart may be skirting the law as there is a legal requirement to list subsidiaries that account for greater than 10 percent of assets or income. It has 22 shell companies there 20 established since 2009 and five in 2015 alone. Walmart does not have one store there. Walmart has transferred ownership of more than $45 billion in assets to Luxembourg subsidiaries since 2011. It reported paying less than 1 percent in tax to Luxembourg on $1.3 billion in profits from 2010 through 2013. At least 25 out of 27 (and perhaps all) of Walmarts foreign operating companies (in the U.K. Brazil, Japan, China and more) are owned by subsidiaries in tax havens. All of these companies have retail stores and many employees. Walmart owns at least $76 billion in assets through shell companies domiciled in the tax havens of Luxembourg ($64.2 billion) and the Netherlands ($12.4 billion) thats 90 percent of the assets in Walmarts International division ($85 billion) or 37 percent of its total assets ($205 billion). It is using tax-haven subsidiaries to minimize foreign taxes where it has retail operations and to avoid U.S. tax on those foreign earnings. Walmart apparently hopes the U.S. Congress will reward its use of tax havens by enacting legislation that would allow U.S.-based multinationals to pay little U.S. tax when repatriating current low-taxed foreign earnings (such as to fund infrastructure spending) and pay no tax with the adoption of a territorial tax system. Among the issues to pursue: Download the full report here. Post Comment Private Reply Ignore Thread Top Page Up Full Thread Page Down Bottom/Latest Begin Trace Mode for Comment # 12.
#5. To: Willie Green (#0)
Good for walmart. Corporate taxes are 100% paid by the consumer.
Baloney...
Baloney backatcha . . . 1. Taxes are a cost of doing business What is so difficult to understand about this? BTW - if you don't like the fact that LEGAL tax shelters exist, then contact your local rep to lobby to get them changed.
Nonsense. Corporate Income Taxes are a confiscation of a portion of corporate profits, which is calculated AFTER costs are deducted from revenue. Yeah... that's why businesses NEVER go bankrupt... they just "pass along costs to the consumer"... /sarcasm Rufus, it's painfully obvious that you haven't the slightest grasp of fundamental principals of business accounting or economics.
Yeah, I guess you're right. Wanna loan me your textbook?
There are no replies to Comment # 12. End Trace Mode for Comment # 12.
Top Page Up Full Thread Page Down Bottom/Latest |
[Home] [Headlines] [Latest Articles] [Latest Comments] [Post] [Mail] [Sign-in] [Setup] [Help] [Register]
|