It’s not enough that Goldman Sachs is a “ financial snake pit rife with greed, conflicts of interest, and wrongdoing.” The company has to dodge paying a fair share of taxes, too.
Goldman Sachs’s latest financial report shows that the company avoided paying federal income taxes on almost half its United States profits in 2014. In fact, the company paid an effective tax rate of just 18.6 percent on $6.8 billion in U.S. profits.
Most of Goldman’s low tax rate (about half the statutory rate of 35 percent) can be attributed to a tax break that allows corporations to write off the so-called cost of issuing stock options to their executives in lieu of salaries. Goldman disclosed saving a whopping $782 million in income taxes through this break in 2014.
