Title: Boeing Paid No Federal Income Tax Last Year: Analysis | HuffPost
Headings: Boeing Paid No Federal Income Tax Last Year: Analysis
Boeing Paid No Federal Income Tax Last Year: Analysis
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Content: The company has a history of using loopholes to lower its tax bill, according to Matt Gardner, the executive director of the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy. The report found that Boeing paid a tax rate of -0.4 percent over the past five years. Download
“The fact that Boeing paid no income tax this year is not at all surprising because they have a very reliable track record of paying little or nothing in federal and income state tax,” Gardner said. Boeing disputes the report’s findings, saying its federal tax rate was actually 26.4 percent last year. Chaz Bickers, a Boeing spokesman, said the analysis ignores a crucial part of the company’s tax expense. When the Boeing decides to embark on building a new aircraft, its taxes are deferred to encourage investment that could take decades to materialize a profit. But once they actually deliver the aircraft, those deferred taxes turn into current ones. “Our current tax expense has been reduced somewhat in recent years by the very large investment we have made in American jobs, production facilities and research and development for our new airplanes — they are taxes that largely are deferred until we begin to deliver our new airplanes (and get the revenue back from our investment) in high volume at steady rates,” Bickers wrote in an email to The Huffington Post. The chart below from Boeing’s 10-K filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission shows the company’s deferred and current tax expenses. The -82 under “Current tax expense” is what the company paid in federal taxes this year, while other taxes are listed as “deferred.”