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The IRS, part of the Treasury Department, is the nation’s tax-collecting agency and many tax records are considered confidential documents.
Elon Musk. File photo: AP
ProPublica described the records as “confidential” and did not disclose how it obtained them.
US President
has sought tax increases on the wealthy to help fund proposed spending on infrastructure and social programmes, including raising the top tax rate to 39.6 per cent from the current 37 per cent and nearly doubling the capital gains tax rate to 39.6 per cent for Americans earning US$1 million annually or more.
Others who paid nothing to the Internal Revenue Service in some years included news industry billionaire and former New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg, activist investor billionaire Carl Icahn, and philanthropist and financial giant George Soros.
ProPublica says the billionaires did nothing illegal in their tax declarations, but employed tax-avoidance strategies “beyond the reach of ordinary people”.
They also benefited from the way taxable income is defined in the US tax code, since it does not take into account the growing value of assets like stock and property, and only taxes proceeds from sales of those items.
The report comes days after G7 finance ministers endorsed a global minimum corporate tax rate of at least 15 per cent, one of several tax proposals aimed at ensuring profitable multinationals pay their fair share.
George Soros. File photo: AP
Other efforts include Democratic Senator Elizabeth Warren’s initiative to tax the super-wealthy, including the value of their stock holdings and homes, rather than focusing on income alone.
“Our tax system is rigged for billionaires who don’t make their fortunes through income, like working families do,” Warren said as she published the ProPublica article on Twitter.
“It is time for a #WealthTax in America to make the ultra-rich finally pay their fair share.”
Bezos in 2011 reported that his investment losses exceeded his income, meaning he could report a loss for the year. He also received a US$4,000 tax credit for his children that year, according to the report.
A spokesman for Soros, who has supported higher taxes on the rich, told ProPublica that the billionaire had lost money on his investments from 2016 to 2018 and so did not owe federal income tax for those years. Musk responded to ProPublica’s initial request for comment with a punctuation mark – “?’’ – and did not answer detailed follow-up questions.
Bloomberg and Icahn told the publication they had paid all taxes they owed.
ProPublica reported that the tax bills of the rich are especially low when compared with their soaring wealth – the value of their investment portfolios, real estate and other assets. Using calculations by Forbes magazine, ProPublica noted that the wealth of the 25 richest Americans collectively jumped by US$401 billion from 2014 to 2018. They paid US$13.6 billion in federal income taxes over those years – equal to just 3.4 per cent of the increase in their wealth.
What ProPublica calls the “true tax rate” means that Warren Buffett, for example, paid only 0.1 per cent in taxes between 2014 and 2018.
Reuters, Agence France-Presse, Associated Press
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