Two Thirds of Corporations Paid No Income Taxes from 1998 to 2005

Roughly two thirds of U.S. corporations paid no income taxes each year from 1998 to 2005, a new report from the Government Accountability Office (GAO) shows.

The GAO found that even more foreign-controlled corporations doing business in America paid none.

Among U.S. corporations, 65 percent paid no income taxes, whereas 68 percent of foreign-controlled companies paid none, yielding an average of 67 percent.

Corporations can claim zero taxable income in different ways. Most commonly, corporations claimed that tax deductions more than offset their positive incomes, before net operating losses were taken into account; that was how 52 percent of the corporations in question claimed zero liability on tax forms, the study found.