Special Report: Massive CEO Rewards for Tax Dodging

Institute for Policy Studies report, Executive Excess 2011: The Massive CEO Rewards for Tax Dodging, found that 25 of 100 U.S. corporations paid their chief executive more than what the company paid in federal corporate income tax in 2010.

According to the report, "Corporate outlays for CEO compensation — despite the lingering Great Recession — are rising. Employment levels have barely rebounded from their recessionary lows. Top executive pay levels, by contrast, have rebounded nearly all the way back from their pre-recession levels.

"In 2009, major corporate CEOs took home 263 times the pay of America's average workers. Last year, this gap leaped to 325-to-1...Among the nation's top firms, the S&P 500, CEO pay last year averaged $10,762,304, up 27.8 percent over 2009. Average worker pay in 2010 [finished] at $33,121, up just 3.3 percent over the year before.

"The report finds no evidence that CEOs are fashioning...more effective and efficient enterprises. On the other hand, ample evidence suggests that CEOs and their corporations are expending considerably more energy on avoiding taxes than perhaps ever before — at a time when the federal government desperately needs more revenue to maintain basic services for the American people. This disinvestment also undermines the infrastructure and services that small and large businesses also depend upon.

"Investigative journalists and tax research organizations have been documenting how U.S.-based global companies are aggressively shearing — and even totally eliminating — their federal income tax obligations. This past March, for instance, The New York Times traced the steps General Electric has taken to avoid U.S. corporate taxes for the last five years. Citizens for Tax Justice, as part of a forthcoming study on tax avoidance among the Fortune 500, has identified 12 corporations that have paid an effective rate of negative 1.5 percent on $171 billion in profits."

Read The Nation's write-up of the Report.