Apple, Cisco, Google, Microsoft And Oracle Already Have A Tax Rate Below 20%

The House of Representatives and the US Senate US They are working to approve a tax reform that has the goal of 20% of the tax on the companies of President Trump. It is promoted that given that the tax rate of the United States is 35% and is higher than in almost all other countries, the United States should abandon it. However, when several deductions are used, as you will see, the actual and reported cash paid in taxes is much less than 35% and in many cases, less than 20%.

And keep in mind that taxes that are reported in the income statement and actual cash taxes paid (which can be found at the end of the cash flow statements in SEC 10-K documents) are all taxes paid, Not only US Federal Taxes UU So, even though some of the tax rates are above 20%, I feel pretty safe in saying that almost all of these companies are paying less than 20% in federal US taxes.

I developed a Google Docs document with income before taxes, declared taxes, your tax rate, cash taxes paid and this tax rate for these companies. Here are some of the highlights of the last three fiscal years for Apple, Cisco, Google / Alphabet, Microsoft and Oracle.

Apple


    Its reported tax rate has averaged about 25.5% the past three years
    The percentage paid in taxes has been less than 20% in all three years

Cisco

    Its reported rate has been as low as 16.9%
    In the last two years its cash tax rate has been just above 20%

Google/Alphabet

    Its reported tax rate has been below 20% the past two years
    Its cash tax rate has been below 20% all three years and was just 6.8% last year

Microsoft

    Its reported tax rate fell from 34.1% in fiscal 2015 to just 8.4% in fiscal 2017
    It does not report the amount paid in cash

Oracle

    Its reported and cash paid rates were a bit above 20% two and three years ago
    In fiscal 2017 they both fell below 20%

What is unknown unless one has read the details of what is proposed (and I do not think many of those in Congress have done so) is what deductions are being eliminated that could compensate for the fall from 35% to 20%. %. However, I doubt that the law has been drafted so that many companies lose so many deductions that their rate increases.

Although this is a small sample and they are all large multinational companies, it raises the question "Is the federal US business rate really much higher than in other countries?"