OVER THE past three years, Nike has earned $4.1 billion in income. But in that time period, how much federal corporate income tax has the apparel brand paid out to the US government? Apparently, zero.
In 2020, when the Swoosh logged in $2.9 billion in pre-tax income, it reportedly even got a tax rebate of $109 million.
This finding comes from research issued by the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy (ITEP), a think thank based in Washington, D.C., and initially reported by the New York Times.
Implicated along with Nike were 25 other companies — among them the biggest names in the American corporate landscape, including FedEx, HP, and SalesForce.
These companies were able to take advantage of a wide variety of legal loopholes that allowed them to lessen their tax burden, including a recent 2017 law that slashed the corporate tax rate from 35 percent to 21 percent.
In a New York Times chart summarizing the findings, the Swoosh was found to have an effective tax rate of negative 18 percent.
The findings are not exactly a secret, with ITEP analyzing the data from the firms’ publicly issued financial reports that lists income tax expenses.
Former US presidential candidate Senator Bernie Sanders slammed the shoe giant, saying in a tweet, “If you paid $120 for a pair of Nike Air Force 1 shoes, you paid more to Nike than it paid in federal income taxes over the past 3 years.”
Nike did not respond to Quartz’s request for comment.
But in the New York Times, several of the companies named in the report defended their lack of tax payouts.
A spokesperson for Duke Energy said that that company “fully complies with federal and state tax laws.” In addition, she said that its tax obligations are “deferred to future periods, but it did not eliminate them.”
Another energy company, DTE Energy, said that “the benefit of these federal tax savings are passed on to utility customers in the form of lower utility bills.”
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