Questions About How Apple's Spending Its Tax Savings Ahead Of Eearnings Call Tomorrow

WASHINGTON - Today,  Apple will hold its quarterly earnings report and this presents an opportunity to ask the company whether it will invest more of its tax savings in its workers.  According to a new website launched by Americans for Tax Fairness, which tracks what corporations are doing with their Trump-GOP tax cuts, Apple is sharing little of its tax-cut wealth with its employees or the country.

“When Apple recently announced its ‘$350 billion contribution’ to the U.S. economy over the next five years President Trump and the GOP Congress got millions of dollars of free publicity about how much their tax cuts will benefit workers and the economy. We think the evidence is that the Trump-GOP tax cuts had little to do with Apple’s announcement, and that the company needs to come clean that its huge tax windfall will primarily be used to benefit already wealthy corporate executives and shareholders, not Apple’s workers and consumers,” said Frank Clemente, executive director of Americans for Tax Fairness.

QUESTIONS FOR APPLE:

• Just a single part of Trump’s corporate tax cut—the deep discount on accumulated offshore profits—has handed the company a tax cut of over $40 billion on the $78.5 billion it owed. That’s 133 times more than the approximately $300 million Apple is sharing with its employees through a one-time stock grant bonus. In light of this huge tax savings, why has Apple not announced further pay increases for its workers?
• Apple’s estimated tax cut of $5.6 billion this year is 19 times more than its bonus payments. Again, with such tremendous savings, why hasn’t Apple announced further pay increases?
• Does Apple plan to waste $100 to $150 billion on stock buybacks later this year—up to 500 times more than what it has said it is sharing with employees in bonuses, instead of further pay increases or new investments?
• As the New York Times noted, once you subtract a one-time tax payment on Apple’s offshore profits (misidentified as a new investment) and the amount the company already planned to invest prior to the new law, any spending that’s actually new is a relative pittance for a company approaching a trillion-dollar market value.

Apple claimed it plans to add 20,000 jobs over 5 years. Were these 20,000 jobs due to the new tax law or were they part of previous job expansion plans.

• In Apple’s recent announcement, it notes it currently has 84,000 U.S. employees. That number is up from 80,000 at the end of 2016 and 76,000 in 2015. If it were to keep adding jobs at this rate, it would have added 20,000 U.S. jobs over the next five years without the tax cuts.

Can Apple confirm whether or not the accelerated “investment and job creation,” touting a planned “$350 billion contribution” to the U.S. economy and the addition of 20,000 jobs over the next five years, announced in January, was due to the recently enacted tax law as President Trump and his allies claimed? Our close reading of the company’s press release is that Apple was not making such a claim, and that its $350 billion “contribution” to the economy is largely ongoing business expenses like employee wages and purchases from domestic suppliers.

President Trump and Congressional Republicans promised that workers would see their pay increase by at least $4,000 a year due to the huge corporate tax breaks contained in the massive $1.9 trillion tax cut. The truth is that most of the Trump-GOP tax cuts benefit the wealthy and big corporations.

As the ATF website documents:

• Only 394 of America’s 26 million businesses have announced a one-time bonus or a wage hike for workers tied to the new tax law.
• Only 4.1% of all workers have been promised such payouts, 6.4 million out of 155 million American workers.
• Corporations are getting 10 times as much in tax cuts as they are giving out in workers’ bonuses and wage hikes, $68 billion vs. $6.7 billion.
• Corporations are spending 42 times as much on stock buybacks as they are spending on workers’ bonuses and wage hikes, $280 billion vs. $6.7 billion.
• Despite the deceptive inclusion of the word “Jobs” in the law’s title, more than 96,000 workers have been laid off since the tax bill passed Congress.

Visit AmericansforTaxFairness.org to view our findings and for additional stories on what corporations are truly spending their tax cuts on.