March 27,2025

Announcing New Findings on Pfizer Tax Dodging, Wyden Blasts Republican Plan for More Corporate Tax Breaks

As Prepared for Delivery

Watch a video of Wyden deliver his remarks here

Four years ago, I kicked off an investigation of Big Pharma’s tax practices -- the dodges and tricks these hugely profitable, multinational firms use to winnow down their tax bills.

This was not all that long after Trump’s first tax breaks for corporations went into effect. My Democratic colleagues on the Finance Committee and I wanted to know exactly how sweet a deal Trump gave the biggest drug companies. What changes needed to be made to ensure these corporations paid a fair share?

So far in the course of my investigation, I have released information on the tax practices of five major drug companies: AbbVie, Abbott Laboratories, Amgen, Bristol Myers Squibb, and Merck. The questions I asked these firms were not all that complicated. Essentially, what I asked came down to questions like, how big were your sales and where did you make them? Where did you report your profits? Where did you stick intellectual property? Did you actually pay taxes?

Last year I expanded my investigation with an inquiry to the company Pfizer. Pfizer initially resisted, but my staff and I were not going to let up. Finally, the company provided some answers to key questions.

I ask unanimous consent to enter into the record a memorandum outlining findings of my investigation related to Pfizer’s tax avoidance schemes, which will also be available immediately on the Finance Committee’s website.

I want to take a few minutes to walk through these findings and talk about why they’re so important. And I’m very pleased to be joined by several of my colleagues who are also concerned about this tax dodging.

Here’s the upshot. My investigation has found that Pfizer carried out what could be the largest tax-dodging scheme in the history of Big Pharma.

The U.S. is the largest market for Pfizer’s products. In 2019, the company sold $20 billion worth of drugs to American patients. Now if you’re following along at home and you’re hoping to hear that Pfizer paid a reasonable rate of tax on those profits, I’ve got bad news.

In that same year, Pfizer reported ZERO -- not one red cent -- in taxable U.S. profits. Through various tricks and games, Pfizer was able to shift 100 percent of its U.S. profits to foreign tax havens. That means Pfizer dodged billions of dollars in federal income tax on its U.S. drug sales. There is every reason to believe it continues to do so.

And thanks to the tax law Trump and Republicans passed in 2017, Pfizer doesn’t need to keep that money stashed overseas. Pfizer can take that cash it pockets with its tax dodging schemes and turn it into stock buybacks, dividends, executive compensation, you name it.

There’s an additional matter here that’s also deeply disturbing. The company appears to be keeping some of its tax schemes hidden from view with what it described to me as “confidential arrangements” with the governments of Puerto Rico and Singapore. It’s enough to leave you slack-jawed. This is a Senate investigation that will have a direct impact on tax legislation, and Pfizer is hiding relevant tax information behind NDA’s.

So colleagues, this is now the sixth Big Pharma company where my investigation has uncovered a shocking level of tax dodging. These rip-offs don’t happen by osmosis. They happen because Republicans allow them to happen. With the tax law they passed back in 2017, Republicans delivered Big Pharma a tax break of more than 40 percent. From 2014 to 2016, the industry paid 19.6 percent on average. In 2019 and 2020, it paid 11.6 percent.

Now, reasonable people watching at home might be thinking about how Republicans always claim to be worried about deficits and debt. Surely those Republicans would dial back what they did in 2017 and ask these huge, profitable corporations to pay a little more to ease our fiscal challenges, right? Wrong.

I want to bring my colleagues into this discussion, so I’ll close by looking at the big picture as the Congress moves forward with this debate on taxes, health care, child hunger and more.

Republicans are in control of the Congress and the White House, and they’ve locked Democrats out of the discussion in this debate. Somewhere here on Capitol Hill, there’s a group of Republicans meeting right now behind closed doors, quietly planning the outline of their gigantic bill. Nobody in that room is talking about how to protect people who work for a living or how to bring more fairness to our economy. The discussion they’re having comes down to how big the handouts are going to be for billionaires and corporations.

How many tens of millions of Americans they’ll kick off Medicaid to pay for it.

How many millions of kids will go hungry.

How many hundreds of thousands of workers will lose their jobs.

Republicans are doubling down on a broken system, and if you want to see that system in action, you couldn’t find a better example than Big Pharma’s tax dodging. These are huge corporations that rake in enormous profits on U.S. sales because they charge astronomical prices in this country, and then their stables of lawyers and accountants get to work on some fancy financial wizardry, taking advantage of loopholes and rip-offs planted by Republican lawmakers. Suddenly the record profits get shipped overseas. Often the factories get shipped overseas too. The jobs get shipped overseas. And the companies aren’t paying anything close to a fair share in taxes. Typical Americans who pay tax out of every paycheck get ripped off.

Republicans are not going to fix this broken, unfair system. In fact, they’re gearing up to give tax-dodging corporations like these and their billionaire shareholders even bigger handouts. It is a scam and a rip-off on a national scale. The American people see it for what it is. Senate Democrats are going to keep calling it out, because this cannot stand. 

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