From Huffington Post: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/03/11/general-electric-taxes_n_2852094.html
By Bonnie Kavoussi
03/11/2013
The company with the most profits parked overseas is General Electric, according to a new Bloomberg analysis of 83 corporations.
GE said in a Feb. 26 regulatory filing that it was holding $108 billion in profits overseas as of the end of last year. That is up from $102 billion a year before. GE said in the filing that it reinvested most of these profits in foreign business operations and does not intend to bring those profits back to the U.S.
The practice of holding profits overseas has been highlighted as a strategy to avoid paying taxes. GE paid no U.S. taxes at all in 2010, according to The New York Times — an allegation GE spokesman Seth Martin called “untrue” in an email to The Huffington Post Monday.
GE did not comment on the $108 billion in profits overseas.
Sixty big U.S. companies analyzed by the Wall Street Journal kept on average more than 40 percent of their annual profits overseas last year. The companies have attributed a growing amount of their revenue to foreign sales, and they have assigned patents and licenses to foreign subsidiaries. Thanks to these practices, the U.S. is not only losing out on tax revenue, but it is also missing money kept overseas that will not be used to invest in the U.S. or pay dividends to shareholders.
It has become increasingly common for companies to move or keep their profits overseas. The biggest U.S. companies boosted their offshore cash hoards by 14 percent last year, according to a separate Bloomberg report. Apple, Microsoft and Google together have more than doubled their overseas holdings over the past two years. The drugmakers Merck and Johnson & Johnson each saved about $2 billion last year by shifting profits overseas, according to Bloomberg.
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