With Monday marking the income tax filing deadline in the U.S., there has been renewed interest in how some of the nation’s top corporations manage to pay just a small fraction of their earnings in taxes, sometimes owing nothing at all to the government. Here are some leading corporations’ tricks for minimizing their tax bills:
- McDonald’s: Over 500 locations in major metropolitan areas classified as churches
- Fisher-Price: Only employing war veterans
- ExxonMobil: Investing in green technology by the hundreds of dollars
- Nabisco: Claimed this year’s batch of Wheat Thins didn’t turn out well and lost the company millions, even though everyone knows this year’s batch was excellent
- Hostess Brands: Chapter 11 bankruptcy
- Kraft Foods: Underreporting net profits by claiming cost of producing each slice of cheese is $600,000
- NBC: Consistently making and airing terrible programming that hasn’t earned company a single dollar in profit since 2003
- The Boeing Company: Using 1040EZ form