Corporate Fair Share

Massachusetts loses hundreds of millions of dollars each year to offshore corporate tax-dodging. Billionaire global corporations like Apple, Amazon, McDonald’s, and Walmart are concealing their profits in offshore tax havens to avoid paying their fair share in Massachusetts taxes.

This is money that could be going to improving the lives of working people in Massachusetts, but instead is being used to line the pockets of billionaires. Such tax-dodging also gives these mega-corporations an unfair advantage over local businesses, who don’t have armies of tax attorneys helping them hide their money in the Cayman Islands.

We need to raise more revenue if we want to deliver on a vision of Massachusetts where everyone has access to high-quality, affordable child care, higher education, health care, housing, and transportation (the list goes on). However, as budget cuts loom from the effort by Republicans in Congress to destroy Medicaid and other vital programs and as the Trump-Musk administration unconstitutionally revokes funding, Massachusetts needs to raise more revenue to protect all of our essential services. We need to protect and to strengthen, and we need revenue to do both.

The Solution

This bill would make large global mega-corporations pay the state’s existing corporate tax rate on a higher share of the excess profits they conceal offshore.

The federal government uses a formula known as Global Intangible Low-Taxed  Income (GILTI) to tax these excess profits that large global corporations stash in offshore tax havens. States can require corporations to pay tax on up to 50% of these offshored excess profits, as the federal government does. New Hampshire, Rhode Island, Vermont, and Maine all do this. Massachusetts only taxes 5%. This bill would bring us in line with our neighbors and the federal government, raising hundreds of millions of dollars in new annual revenues. This is money the Commonwealth is now leaving on the table.