Corporate tax dodging and excessive executive pay have grown so rampant that dozens of major American companies now pay more money to their top executives than they pay in federal income taxes, a new report has found.
The progressive nonprofit Americans for Tax Fairness and the nonprofit wealth gap watchdog Institute for Policy Studies examined executive pay from 2018 to 2022 at the country’s most successful corporate tax dodgers. They found that at 64 major companies, compensation outstripped their corporate tax bills at least two years out of five.
“Corporate boards have more money to spend on their highest-paid employees when they don’t have much or anything to pay in taxes,” read the report. “Executives are in part reaping rewards for the corporate tax avoidance strategies they pursue.”
At 35 companies — including Netflix, Ford, Tesla, T-Mobile, DISH Network, and more than a dozen energy companies — the top five executives took home more money than those companies paid in taxes for all five years of the study. About half paid no federal corporate income taxes at all and received substantial tax refunds.
The cumulative executive pay at those 35 companies was $9.5 billion, while their total corporate tax bills netted out to a refund of $1.8 billion. Every company included in the report posted a profit all five years.
The report partly linked runaway executive take-home pay to the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, signed in 2017 by then-President Donald Trump. The law supercharged stock buybacks — a practice that allows companies to inflate their own stock price by buying back shares from the open market — which can directly boost executive pay.
The act also slashed the starting corporate income tax rate from 35% to 21%, which major multinationals lowered even further using loopholes and special tax breaks. In practice, the 64 companies highlighted in this report paid an average federal tax rate of 2.8%.
But even before the Trump tax cuts, the tax code privileged the pay of ultra wealthy executives. One loophole allows executives to shelter an unlimited share of their pay in special retirement accounts. Unlike ordinary 401(k)s, there are no caps.
A number of progressive Democratic proposals before Congress would rein in executive pay by taxing companies where the CEO-to-worker pay gap is greater than 50 to 1 or pegging a company’s tax rate to the size of that its worker-executive gap. Another would close the loophole allowing unlimited executive contributions to tax-deferred retirement accounts.
“This report shows how executives of big corporations are rewarded for aggressive tax avoidance while working families and small businesses are left to pick up the tab,” said IPS Global Economy director and report co-author Sarah Anderson.