Directions Newsletter
New report reveals Walmart's overseas tax havens
Toronto – June 24, 2015 – A newly-released report sheds light on to Walmart's concealment of at least $76 billion in assets. The report reveals an elaborate and undisclosed web of at least 75 subsidiaries and branches in 15 offshore tax havens, which the company may use to minimize foreign taxes where it has retail operations as well as to avoid paying taxes on those earnings.
The Walmart Web: How the World's Biggest Corporation Secretly Uses Tax Havens to Dodge Taxes report, researched and published by Americans for Tax Fairness, shows that the corporate giant has made tax havens central to growing its international division, which now accounts for one-third of the company's profits. The report finds that Walmart has a network of 78 undisclosed overseas subsidiaries in tax havens, where they have no retail operations and few, if any, employees. Twenty-two of these "companies" are in Luxembourg alone.
Walmart has avoided scrutiny of its international tax dodging in the past by declining to disclose its tax haven subsidiaries on the company's annual filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission.
"Companies use tax havens to dodge taxes. It appears that's the secret game Walmart is playing," says Frank Clemente, executive director of Americans for Tax Fairness. "Average Americans and small businesses have to make up the difference when Walmart doesn't pay its fair share of taxes."