Among lowest taxpayers were companies whose CEOs have become high-profile advocates for corporate social responsibility
Some of the US’s most profitable corporations, including General Motors, Citigroup and Netflix, have slashed their tax bills in the years since the passage of the Trump tax cuts, with nearly a quarter paying rates in the single digits and 23 paying nothing, a report has found.
The 2017 law cut the top corporate income tax rate from 35% to 21%. But the new assessment of corporate tax avoidance, published on Thursday by the non-profit Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy (Itep), found that during the first five years the law was in effect, many profitable public companies in the US paid a far lower rate in practice.
Corporate social responsibility as a concept is even broader than that – it’s not just anyone who has interest in the company doing well, but broad consideration of anyone impacted by the decisions of the company.
A company might be able to save operational costs by dumping toxic sludge in a river, but within a CSR framework, people living downstream would be considered stakeholders and the potential negative impact of the decision on those people is supposed to be taken into account when decisions are made. The corporation is supposed to have a responsibility to do right by anyone impacted by their actions wherever possible.
At least that’s the theory. It shouldn’t be surprising that the language of CSR gets pretty commonly coopted by companies looking to whitewash what they’re actually doing.