Corporate Tax Behavior So Bad Even Fortune Magazine Can’t Stomach It
There is “a new kind of American corporate exceptionalism,” he writes: “companies that have decided to desert our country to avoid paying taxes but expect to keep receiving the full array of benefits that being American confers, and that everyone else is paying for.”
Fortune includes on the list Eaton PLC, which produces a range of mechanical and electrical components, which has its U.S. headquarters in Cleveland but its “tax residence” in Ireland. Its CEO, Alexander Cutler, Fortune helpfully notes, “also happens to be a member of the Campaign to Fix the Debt, a nonpartisan organization that advocates cutting government spending and increasing tax revenue. He wants to close tax loopholes—but he sure isn’t proposing to return his corporation to full U.S. taxpaying status.”
The company that makes Trane air conditioners, Ingersoll Rand, is now domiciled for tax purposes in Ireland. So is “the world’s largest manufacturer of over-the-counter drugs,” Perrigo, which Fortune reports is suing the Food and Drug Administration “(for which the company doesn’t pay its fair share) for allegedly not moving quickly enough to allow its testosterone gel to be sold without a prescription.”
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