Broligarchy Watch

The big American tech firms known as the “Silicon Six” have been accused of paying almost $278bn (£211bn) less corporate income tax in the past decade compared with the statutory rate for US companies making the same profits.

Amazon, Meta, Alphabet, Netflix, Apple and Microsoft generated $11tn of revenue and $2.5tn of profits over the past 10 years.

Yet they paid an average 18.8% in combined national and federal corporation taxes, compared with an average 29.7% in the US, according to the Fair Tax Foundation (FTF), which said the Silicon Six had “hardwired” tax avoidance into their business models.

Analysis by the not-for-profit organisation found that if one-off repatriation tax payments in the US connected to historical tax avoidance were excluded, the average corporate income tax contribution of the six firms fell to 16.1% over the past decade.

The companies had also inflated their stated tax payments by $82bn over the same period by including contingencies for tax they did not expect to pay, the report claimed.

Paul Monaghan, the chief executive of the FTF, said: “Our analysis would indicate that tax avoidance continues to be hardwired into corporate structures. The Silicon Six’s corporate income tax contributions are, in percentage terms, way below what sectors such as banking and energy are paying in many parts of the world.”

Monaghan pointed to “aggressive tax practices” such as the contingency tax positions, while the companies also exerted “enormous political influence as well as economic power”, spending millions of dollars on lobbying governments.

The report comes as the US tech companies’ influence has been highlighted by the presence of their bosses including Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, Apple’s Tim Cook and Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg at Donald Trump’s second inauguration.

A significant tax cut for such companies has reportedly been at the heart of discussions with the UK in its attempts to secure lower tariffs on its products exported to the US.