How America's Corporate Overlords Screw Us on Taxes

When Dante descended into the Inferno, guided by Virgil, he passed through Circles of Gluttony and Greed, and of Heresy and Fraud and Treachery.

The modern-day version is the corporate tax filing to the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC). Navigation through the hellish form is fraught with anguish and pain and bewilderment, causing the visitor to beg for release from its devilish grasp, to shudder when recalling the sign at the entrance: "Abandon all hope, ye who enter here."

The Circle of Betrayal: Big Profits Overseas, Big Losses in the U.S. [/font]

[font=Times]Bank of America, Citigroup, and Pfizer can be found here. In the last two years each one of them made much of their revenue in the U.S., but they claimed billions of dollars in foreign profits and billions of dollars in U.S. losses.

Here are the sordid details:

Citigroup, whose 2005 "Plutonomy Memo" said that "the World is dividing into two blocs - the Plutonomy and the rest," had 42% of its 2011-12 revenue in North America (almost all U.S.) but declared a $5 billion U.S. loss and a $28 billion foreign profit.

Pfizer had 40% of its 2011-12 revenues in the U.S., but declared almost $7 billion in U.S. losses to go along with $31 billion in foreign profits. After the SEC questioned Pfizer in 2012 about four straight years of U.S. losses despite large worldwide incomes, the company went ahead and declared a fifth straight U.S. loss.

Bank of America may be the worst. CEO Brian Moynihan once lamented that nobody understood "how much good" his employees do. But his company, with a whopping 82% of its 2011-12 revenue in the U.S., declared $7 billion in U.S. losses and $10 billion in foreign profits.

Circles of Duplicity and Disdain [/font]

[font=Times]This is where Dante might have seen the shadowy image of a human face on the body of a venomous barb-tailed dragon. These are companies with US-declared 2011-12 incomes that appear to fall far short of a reasonable amount based on their usage of U.S. resources and privileges.