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Executives Pushing Budget Cuts Rake In Millions From Tax Loophole
Executives Pushing Budget Cuts Rake In Millions From Tax Loophole
By Bryce Covert on May 2, 2013 at 10:00 am
Fixthe Debt, a group of CEOs at some of the country’s largest corporations, has been pushing an anti-debt agenda with stern warnings about the urgent need for deficit reduction. But many of its members have benefitted from a loophole in the tax code that has allowed them to deduct “performance pay” from their executive salaries and thus avoid paying millions in taxes.
A new report from the Institute for Policy Studies and Campaign for America’s Future finds that 90 member firms took in somewhere between $953 million and $1.6 billion through the ability to deduct performance pay from corporate taxes between 2009 and 2011. The report includes the biggest winners of this loophole:
–UnitedHealth Group: This company was at the top of the list, deducting at least $194 million of its total $199 million compensation for CEO Stephen Hemsley during that time period. The report calculates that this works out to a $68 million taxpayer subsidy to UnitedHealth, plus another $10 million tax break for Hemsley’s $28 million performance pay in 2012.
...
During that three-year period, CEOs and the next three top executives at each of the 90 Fixthe Debt corporations were paid a total of $6.3 billion, 75 percent of which was in fully deductible performance pay, equaling $2.7 billion. Depending on how everything was calculated (which is hard to know with current disclosure rules), that comes to about $1.5 million in taxpayer subsidy per executive or $18 million per company
...
http://thinkprogress.org/economy/2013/05/02/1953261/fix-the-debt-millions-tax-loophole/
By Bryce Covert on May 2, 2013 at 10:00 am
Fixthe Debt, a group of CEOs at some of the country’s largest corporations, has been pushing an anti-debt agenda with stern warnings about the urgent need for deficit reduction. But many of its members have benefitted from a loophole in the tax code that has allowed them to deduct “performance pay” from their executive salaries and thus avoid paying millions in taxes.
A new report from the Institute for Policy Studies and Campaign for America’s Future finds that 90 member firms took in somewhere between $953 million and $1.6 billion through the ability to deduct performance pay from corporate taxes between 2009 and 2011. The report includes the biggest winners of this loophole:
–UnitedHealth Group: This company was at the top of the list, deducting at least $194 million of its total $199 million compensation for CEO Stephen Hemsley during that time period. The report calculates that this works out to a $68 million taxpayer subsidy to UnitedHealth, plus another $10 million tax break for Hemsley’s $28 million performance pay in 2012.
...
During that three-year period, CEOs and the next three top executives at each of the 90 Fixthe Debt corporations were paid a total of $6.3 billion, 75 percent of which was in fully deductible performance pay, equaling $2.7 billion. Depending on how everything was calculated (which is hard to know with current disclosure rules), that comes to about $1.5 million in taxpayer subsidy per executive or $18 million per company
...
http://thinkprogress.org/economy/2013/05/02/1953261/fix-the-debt-millions-tax-loophole/
Not surprising to anyone here I'm sure, but still. The shameless greed these parasites display should be a crime.
3 replies
= new reply since forum marked as read
= new reply since forum marked as read
And yes this should be considered a federal felony: it's grand larceny. 
