Legistorm: Transparency's Sidekick

Before the Tax Reform Act of 1986, some of the nation's largest companies paid taxes at rates far lower than the statutory rate. This legislation was expected to eliminate or reduce the impact of many of the tax laws that had allowed companies to cut their tax bills by deferring some of their tax expense to the future. This report reviews U.S. and worldwide tax rates of large U.S. companies for 1988 and 1989. GAO (1) computes effective tax rates for 220 large firms in 29 industries for each year and (2) tries to identify the reasons for low or high effective tax rates for each industry.