Some very large American companies are paying almost nothing in taxes and some are even getting refunds.
Four out of the top five companies trading on the American stock market did not pay any federal taxes in 2014, and three of them received tax refunds, according to a study conducted by the financial planning website WalletHub.
WalletHub analyzed the annual reports of all the companies trading in the S&P 100, the 100 leading U.S. stocks, and found that these 100 large corporations were paying U.S. taxes nearly equal to the top three percent of Americans.
![Chart courtesy of WalletHub](https://dailycaller.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/10/Screenshot-2015-10-21-at-4.14.14-PM.png)
Some, though, paid a lot less. Morgan Stanley, the company with the lowest overall tax rate, had a federal tax rate of negative 45 percent, which means the company that brought in $34 billion last year also got a 45 percent tax rebate from Uncle Sam.
Similarly, General Motors, which came in second place, had a federal tax rate of negative 33 percent in 2014. The car manufacturer brought in $156 billion last year.
General Electric, QUALCOMM and Time Warner rounded out the top five corporations that paid the least in taxes.
GE had a federal tax rate of negative seven percent, while the other two companies actually paid taxes in 2014, four and seven percent, respectively.
In order to calculate the tax burden for each company, WalletHub used data from each company’s 2014 annual report to identify revenues and tax payments on the state, federal and international level, and used this information to determine their effective tax rates in each jurisdiction.
On the other end of the spectrum, several high profile companies had tax burdens of more than three quarters of their revenue.
Abbott labs, a technology company based out of Maryland, had the highest U.S. tax rate of any company at 82.9 percent. The airline booking company Priceline came in a close second at 82.85 percent, followed by Citigroup, Colgate and Apple, who all paid between 62 and 75 percent.
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