Wyden Unveils Findings of Pfizer Tax Dodging Investigation
New Details of Pfizer Tax Avoidance Continue Wyden’s Ongoing Tax Investigation of Big Pharma
Washington, D.C. – Continuing his ongoing investigation of drug company tax avoidance, Senate Finance Committee Ranking Member Ron Wyden, D-Ore., unveiled new findings specific to tax dodging by the company Pfizer. In 2019, Pfizer sold $20 billion worth of drugs to American patients, but the company reported zero taxable U.S. profits by claiming 100 percent of its profits were earned offshore. This allowed Pfizer to dodge billions in U.S. taxes in one year alone.
The investigation also found that Pfizer signed nondisclosure agreements with the governments of Singapore and Puerto Rico on special tax deals arranged with those jurisdictions, which helped the company keep the details of how Pfizer avoids billions in taxes hidden from the U.S. Congress.
“Pfizer carried out what could be the largest tax-dodging scheme in the history of Big Pharma,” Wyden said. “These corporate tax ripoffs don’t happen by osmosis. They happen because Republicans allow them to. After giving big pharma enormous tax breaks in 2017, Trump and Republicans are gearing up to give these hugely profitable firms and their billionaire shareholders another round of handouts that’ll get turned into stock buybacks and executive compensation. Republicans are planning to pay for it by driving typical American families into hardship and kicking tens of millions off their health insurance. This is a scam and a ripoff on a national scale, and the American people have every right to be outraged by it.”
The full report containing new findings on Pfizer’s tax dodging scheme is available here. Pfizer’s 2019 cross-border tax avoidance structure is larger than those previously discovered by Senator Wyden’s staff investigation, including AbbVie, Amgen and Merck. Pfizer joins a growing list of massively-profitable pharmaceutical corporations that show little-to-zero U.S. profits on tax returns, even though the U.S. is big pharma’s largest customer market.
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