Tax Day 2012: Tax Dodger of the Year Award

Saturday, April 14, 2012 from 11 a.m. – 1 p.m., Occupy Redding will present its inaugural Corporate Tax Dodger of the Year Award to none other than all-around terrible corporate citizen Verizon.
The gala awards ceremony will take place at the Redding corporate Verizon store located at 917 Dana Drive in the Discovery Village Shopping Center.
Not only is Verizon a corporate tax dodger, it has recently accelerated internal attacks on its employees & employee unions. In August of 2011, 45,000 Verizon employees went on strike to protest the company’s push for employees to give back $1 billion in health, pension and other contract concessions.
The Center for Tax Justice commented at the time that Verizon’s stance is particularly galling, given that Verizon is both highly profitable and already a model of poor corporate citizenship.
Despite earning over $32.5 billion over the last 3 years, Verizon not only paid nothing in corporate income taxes, it actually received nearly $1 billion in tax benefits from the federal government during that time—the same amount as the concessions they’re begging for!

Ivan Seidenberg, Verizon CEO & smug 1%’er, was paid $18.7 million in 2010 while laying off 13,000 employees and while Verizon paid no corporate income tax.

In the same year, after posting a loss in the fourth quarter of 2009, Verizon’s CEO tried to appease shareholders by laying off 13,000 employees. With such a tremendous cutting of costs, one would expect the company to stem the alleged bleeding by making everyone cut back – from bottom to top.
Was that the case? Well, Verizon CEO Ivan G. Seidenberg still received his tidy $18.17 million in compensation in 2010. Maybe he had to give up a speedboat or two?
In 2010, Verizon reported an annual profit of nearly $12 billion. The statutory federal corporate income tax rate is 35 percent, so theoretically, Verizon should have owed the IRS around $4.2 billlion.
Instead, according to figures compiled by the Center for Tax Justice, the company actually boasted a negative tax liability of $703 million. Verizon ended up making even more money after it calculated its taxes.
The bottom line is that you and I, the 99%, consistently pay more in taxes each year than one of the most profitable corporations in the world. This corporation not only doesn’t pay a dollar in taxes—it gets refunds in the millions!
Is this any way to do business in the USA? Occupy the Corporation!
Join us on April 14, 2012 and make your voices heard.  We are the 99% — we do not accept a world where the people are bled dry while the wealthy pad their own bulging pockets.