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Saturday marked US Uncut’s second big nationwide protest. From coast-to-coast, more than forty cities joined in a day of action protesting the tax-dodging practices of massive corporations that they see as the real source of the country’s deficit.

“I’m tired of people calling for shared sacrifice and it’s all coming from the workers and nothing’s coming from the top,” says protester Dave Sonenberg. “I’m sick of companies like Bank of America not paying their taxes.”

Bank of America hasn’t paid a nickel in federal income taxes for the past two years, and in fact raked in an additional $1 billion in tax “benefits.” The bank is enjoying these profits after accepting $45 billion from taxpayers, which the company then got to count as a deduction when they paid back the money.

Big corporations get to play by a whole different set of rules, says tax expert Bob Willens of New York-based Robert Willens LLC.

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Most U.S. and foreign corporations doing business in the United States avoid paying any federal income taxes, despite trillions of dollars worth of sales, a government study released on Tuesday said.

The Government Accountability Office said 72 percent of all foreign corporations and about 57 percent of U.S. companies doing business in the United States paid no federal income taxes for at least one year between 1998 and 2005.

More than half of foreign companies and about 42 percent of U.S. companies paid no U.S. income taxes for two or more years in that period, the report said.

During that time corporate sales in the United States totaled $2.5 trillion, according to Democratic Sens. Carl Levin of Michigan and Byron Dorgan of North Dakota, who requested the GAO study.

The report did not name any companies. The GAO said corporations escaped paying federal income taxes for a variety of reasons including operating losses, tax credits and an ability to use transactions within the company to shift income to low tax countries.

With the U.S. budget deficit this year running close to the record $413 billion that was set in 2004 and projected to hit a record $486 billion next year, lawmakers are looking to plug holes in the U.S. tax code and generate more revenues.

Dorgan in a statement called the report "a shocking indictment of the current tax system." Levin said it made clear that "too many corporations are using tax trickery to send their profits overseas and avoid paying their fair share in the United States."

The study showed about 28 percent of large foreign corporations, those with more than $250 million in assets, doing business in the United States paid no federal income taxes in 2005 despite $372 billion in gross receipts, the senators said. About 25 percent of the largest U.S. companies paid no federal income taxes in 2005 despite $1.1 trillion in gross sales that year, they said.

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This is why two-thirds of corporations in America pay no federal income taxes. If they were forced to, we're told, the whole country would suffer. Jobs would be lost, salaries slashed. Thank heavens we’ve avoided such calamity by allowing corporations to shape legislation in their favor.

In 2010, Bank of America handed out $2.2 million in campaign contributions to Congressional representatives and PACs (36 percent went to Democrats, 64 percent to Republicans). By throwing around that much cash, huge companies like BoA have a big say when it comes to crafting legislation that permits them to escape paying taxes, according to US Uncut organizer J.A. Myerson.

“The reason it’s not illegal is because they have bought and paid for the people who make the laws. The laws are made to accommodate this sort of nefariousness,” he says, adding that the process is wrong, and ordinarily that would mean approaching Congress to ask them to fix it, but there’s no point in attempting that when the system is so heavily rigged in favor of the rich and well connected. “So what US Uncut is doing right now is not Capitol Hill lobbying because that doesn’t seem like it’s a fruitful avenue. It’s trying to directly undermine the ability of Bank of America to earn record windfall profits by depleting the public trust that they are an upstanding member of society.”

The rigged game has left citizens feeling burnt and angry. An activist named Sally says BoA’s practice of evicting people from their homes without the original mortgage notes is illegal, but that “illegal doesn’t seem to matter.”

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The US corporate income tax rate is 35%. Yet this year, Google, which made $5.5 billion in revenues, only paid an effective tax rate of 2.4%. Indeed, it’s not unusual for a corporation to pay only 6-7% in effective taxes. Such numbers put you and me and most small businesses to shame. What gives?

It turns out that tax credits aren’t the only trick corporations use to evade taxes. From Intel to Bath & Body Works, most big American corporations have a subsidiary and income shifting scheme that radically skews the amounts they end up paying the IRS. Here are five of the main components that help corporations write pint-sized IRS checks.

Subsidiaries

Why make profits in your home state when you can move them somewhere with lower income taxes? Such is the rationale of many American companies headquartered in high-tax states. Strategies like the so-called Las Vegas Loophole let companies move profits to subsidiaries located in states like Nevada, which has no corporate income tax.

Chain retailers are among the corporations that love to set up subsidiaries. Wal-Mart, for example, set up an out-of-state subsidiary that “collects ‘rent’ from Wal-Mart stores, enabling the chain to disguise (an estimated $7.3 billion in profits over four years) as expenses,” according to this article. By paying itself rent via a real estate investment trust (REIT), Wal-Mart avoids additional taxes while keeping money inside the corporation.

Another trick is to create a trademark holding company in a state that doesn’t tax intangible assets like trademarks. Home Depot has a paper subsidiary in trademark-tax-free Delaware. This subsidiary collects large trademark use fees from Home Depot stores in other states, writes NewRules. Home Depot deducts those fees as a business expense, and voila, its taxes dive.

Transfer pricing

About half of the 50 US states have adopted combined reporting rules to clog the subsidiary loopholes mentioned above. Combined reporting requires companies to list all of their sources of profit, regardless of state, before figuring out their state tax burden.

For many companies, however, national combined reporting requirements aren’t an issue—they just create subsidiaries in international tax shelters like Ireland and the Cayman Islands. A tool called transfer pricing lets companies make profits in tax havens while allocating expenses to higher-tax countries, writes the OECD Observer.

A company can apply transfer pricing to a variety of financial categories, including interest rates, service charges, share sales, and depreciation. This fickleness makes transfer pricing a continued point of intense scrutiny for governments around the world.

Google’s “Double Irish” strategy is one popular transfer pricing scheme. Google created two companies in Ireland to execute this maneuver. One pays royalties to use intellectual property (expenses that reduce income tax in Ireland). A second, located in Bermuda, collects those royalties. The meat in Google’s sandwich is the Netherlands, where profits go on their way from Ireland to Bermuda.

“Irish tax law exempts certain royalties to companies in other EU- member nations,” according to the excellent Bloomberg article that describes Google’s acrobatics. “A brief detour to the Netherlands avoids…Irish withholding tax.”

If you think the federal government would want to sink its teeth into those profits by implementing an international combined reporting requirement, think again. The feds would rather get what they can without changing the law: Google and the IRS negotiated for three years before coming to “an arrangement” that let the company execute its transfer pricing strategy, according to Bloomberg.

Nowhere income

States can only tax corporations with physical facilities, or a “nexus,” within the boundaries of the state. Otherwise, federal law doesn’t let states tax corporations, according to NewRules. Just selling goods or services in a state without having a factory or other facilities there translates to no state taxes.

Corporations have leveraged this rule to the point of having “nowhere income” that is not taxable in any state. NewRules illustrates with an example: “…if Nails Inc. has all of its property and payroll in two states, but just 10% of its sales in those states, then it will pay state income taxes on only 70% of its profits: (100 + 100 + 10)/3. The other 30% will go untaxed.” Taxes are even easier to avoid in states where sales are more heavily weighted than, say, payroll or property, according to NewRules.

Nowhere income becomes more elaborate if you can pull it off internationally. Intel did just this in the early 2000s, according to CTJ.org. The company declared “millions of dollars in profits from selling US-made computer chips as Japanese income for US tax purposes.” This exempted it from US taxes. Meanwhile, a US-Japan tax treaty required Japan to “treat the profits as American.” That meant Intel didn’t have to pay Japanese tax, either.

Income shifting

No transfer pricing-subsidiary scheme is complete without income shifting. This happens when a company transfers or licenses its intellectual property to a subsidiary in a tax shelter. Any foreign profits based on that technology are taxed according to the subsidiary country’s tax law.

According to US tax rules, such subsidiaries must pay an “arm’s length” amount for those rights, the same mutually-agreed-upon amount any unaffiliated company would pay for them. So parent companies set that amount low to avoid tax burden, writes CTJ.org.

The nature of the loophole means that the feds can’t get lost taxes back, either. Bloomberg writes that “…multinationals that shift profits overseas are deferring U.S. income taxes, not avoiding them permanently. The deferral lasts until companies decide to bring the earnings back to the U.S. In practice, they rarely repatriate significant portions, thus avoiding the taxes indefinitely.”

Tax havens

Some tourist havens, notably Bermuda and Ireland, also happen to be stellar tax havens. “58% of offshore profits are now recorded in tax havens,” according to this FinFacts Ireland article. US operations, for example, have recorded more than $25 billion in profits in tiny Bermuda, which doesn’t charge any taxes, writes FinFacts.

It doesn’t matter that most of those multinationals’ sales happened in higher-tax countries like Germany, the US and the UK. Wherever tax rates are low, multinational profits rise, sometimes exponentially. That translates to tens of billions of dollars the US Treasury doesn’t get its hands on. US corporations, meanwhile, enjoy enviable tax rates, while the tax havens that house them benefit from the injection of foreign capital.

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As you work on your taxes this month, here's something to raise your hackles: Some of the world's biggest, most profitable corporations enjoy a far lower tax rate than you do--that is, if they pay taxes at all.

the tax benefit of overseas operations that is the biggest reason why multinationals end up with lower tax rates than the rest of us. It only makes sense that multinationals "put costs in high-tax countries and profits in low-tax countries," says Scott Hodge, president of the Tax Foundation. Those low-tax countries are almost anywhere but the U.S. "When you add in state taxes, the U.S. has the highest tax burden among industrialized countries," says Hodge. In contrast, China's rate is just 25%; Ireland's is 12.5%.

Corporations are getting smarter, not just about doing more business in low-tax countries, but in moving their more valuable assets there as well. That means setting up overseas subsidiaries, then transferring to them ownership of long-lived, often intangible but highly profitable assets, like patents and software.

As a result, figures tax economist Martin Sullivan, companies are keeping some $28 billion a year out of the clutches of the U.S. Treasury by engaging in so-called transfer pricing arrangements, where, say, Microsoft's ( MSFT - news - people ) overseas subsidiaries license software to its U.S. parent company in return for handsome royalties (that get taxed at those lower overseas rates).

"Corporations are paying lower amounts of their profits in taxes now than in the past," says Douglas Shackelford, who teaches tax law at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. "Other countries have been lowering their rates, but not the U.S."

Mind you, not all global megacorps enjoy such low tax rates. Try to muster some pity for Big Oil. ExxonMobil ( XOM - news - people ) in its 2009 annual report to the SEC, recorded a larger income tax expense than any other U.S. company last year, some $17.6 billion, or 47% of pretax earnings. Exxon's peers Chevron ( CVX - news - people ) and ConocoPhillips ( COP - news - people ) likewise recorded similarly high effective tax rates. The oil companies are oddities among the multinationals because many of the oil-rich countries where they do business levy even higher taxes than the U.S.

Exxon tries to limit the tax pain with the help of 20 wholly owned subsidiaries domiciled in the Bahamas, Bermuda and the Cayman Islands that (legally) shelter the cash flow from operations in the likes of Angola, Azerbaijan and Abu Dhabi. Exxon has tens of billions in earnings permanently reinvested overseas. Likewise, GE has $84 billion in overseas income parked indefinitely outside the U.S.

Though Exxon's financial statement's don't show any net income tax liability owed to Uncle Sam, a company spokesman insists that once its final tax bill is figured, Exxon will owe a "substantial 2009 tax liability." How substantial? "That's not something we're required to disclose, nor do we."

Naturally the Obama administration wants to put an end to this. It has proposed doing away with tax deferrals on overseas income. If the plan passes, a U.S. company that pays a 25% tax on profits in China would have to pay an additional 10% income tax to Uncle Sam to bring it up to the 35% corporate rate. "Eliminating deferrals would put U.S. companies on an unlevel playing field," says the Tax Foundation's Hodge, "especially if competing with the likes of Germany, which only taxes companies on domestic operations."

Hewlett-Packard ( HPQ - news - people ) and others among the top 25 state in their annual reports that if Obama's tax measures pass it would mean a certain tax hike, probably amounting to billions of dollars.

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Fair taxes is the reason liberals don't like tax dodging, in their minds it takes away money from a school or other program. But in terms a conservative might dislike, it also decreases ability for small entities to compete in a free market, and decreases popular support for a free market. Don't think anyone, especially a business type person, should have any love for cheats or dishonesty.

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In that, they're just like you and me, who take all the advantage we can of deductions, credits, write offs, etc. when we do our taxes.

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If you think corporations ... get more tax breaks than they deserve, then you should start looking at the folks who give them those tax breaks. That'd be the Congress. Maybe that's where you should focus your anger, instead of googling "tax cheating corporations" and doing a cut and paste.

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“The reason it’s not illegal is because they have bought and paid for the people who make the laws. The laws are made to accommodate this sort of nefariousness,” ... the process is wrong, and ordinarily that would mean approaching Congress to ask them to fix it, but there’s no point in attempting that when the system is so heavily rigged in favor of the rich and well connected.“

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Strategies like the so-called Las Vegas Loophole let companies move profits to subsidiaries located in states like Nevada, which has no corporate income tax.

Another trick is to create a trademark holding company in a state that doesn’t tax intangible assets like trademarks.

For many companies, however, national combined reporting requirements aren’t an issue—they just create subsidiaries in international tax shelters like Ireland and the Cayman Islands. A tool called transfer pricing lets companies make profits in tax havens while allocating expenses to higher-tax countries.

One pays royalties to use intellectual property (expenses that reduce income tax in Ireland). A second, located in Bermuda, collects those royalties. The meat in Google’s sandwich is the Netherlands, where profits go on their way from Ireland to Bermuda.

“…if Nails Inc. has all of its property and payroll in two states, but just 10% of its sales in those states, then it will pay state income taxes on only 70% of its profits. The other 30% will go untaxed.”

The company declared “millions of dollars in profits from selling US-made computer chips as Japanese income for US tax purposes.” This exempted it from US taxes.

“The deferral lasts until companies decide to bring the earnings back to the U.S. In practice, they rarely repatriate significant portions, thus avoiding the taxes indefinitely.”

US operations, for example, have recorded more than $25 billion in profits in tiny Bermuda, which doesn’t charge any taxes

Wherever tax rates are low, multinational profits rise, sometimes exponentially. That translates to tens of billions of dollars the US Treasury doesn’t get its hands on. US corporations, meanwhile, enjoy enviable tax rates, while the tax havens that house them benefit from the injection of foreign capital.

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I think Niki is saying, it should be. They should play by the same tax rules as say, a small mom-and-pop business. We have reason to believe corporations are allowed much larger and different deductions, which is unfair.

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