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Taxes have become one of the linchpin issues of the 2016 presidential election, with the two candidates taking wildly different views of what companies should pay.So how much do large companies actually pay in taxes and who is paying the least?
WalletHub set out to answer that question and broke down the overall tax rate for the S&P 100 in 2015 using the companies’ annual reports.
As opposed to the supposed 35% federal statutory corporate tax rate in the US, these companies paid an average rate around 28% for the year, including federal, state, and international taxes.
We’ve compiled a list of the 18 firms that WalletHub found which reported positive income and paid less than a 20% overall tax rate in 2015.
There is a wide variety of firms, but a few themes jump out. For one, a lot of pharmaceutical companies are getting tax breaks — 6 of the 18 companies in the list are related to pharmaceuticals or biotech. Additionally, tech firms did well too, with names such as PayPal and Qualcomm making the lowest 18.
We’ve got the full list below, so check it out.