Coca-Cola fined $3.3 billion for defrauding Americans out of tax money while buying off state GMO-labeling elections
by: J. D. Heyes
NaturalNews.com
Tuesday, October 06, 2015
Recently, Coca-Cola made a disclosure that most Americans heard nothing about, even though it affects nearly everyone.
Tucked into a corporate filing, the company announced that it would be paying $3.3 billion in back taxes to the U.S. government – money the government uses to fund everything from national defense to, ironically, the people charged with collecting Coca-Cola’s back taxes.
The reason for the tax, according to the company filing, is for the company’s allegedly inappropriate use of transfer pricing in order to shift tangible property out of the U.S. and into low-tax havens around the world.
“Put another way,” says a blog post at Citizens for Tax Justice, an advocacy group, “the company appears to be pretending, for tax purposes, that some of the income it earns each year in the United States was actually generated in another country.
That is another issue all on its own. Like many other Fortune 500 companies, Coca-Cola keeps a huge portion of its liquid assets offshore in order to escape the highest corporate tax rate in the developed world of 35 percent. Congress is, once again, looking into how the U.S. government can legally get its hands on what would be a major cash cow. For Coke, the company disclosed at the end of 2014 that it had an astounding $33.3 billion in permanently reinvested foreign earnings, which is the 16th highest amount on the Fortune 500 list. These are earnings that the company has said will remain offshore for the foreseeable future, which means they won’t have to pay one dime of tax on the money.
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