FedEx Thou Doth Protest Too Much

A cranky op-ed by a FedEx executive in today’s Tennessean calls the paper out for its “deeply flawed and erroneous report insinuating that FedEx is less than a full-rate taxpayer.” FedEx VP Michael Fryt is responding to a recent Tennessean story about the DC-based Citizens for Tax Justice’s analysis of Fortune 500 companies that paid no federal income taxes during at least one year since 2008. FedEx made the list twice, for having “paid” federal income taxes at a rate below 0 percent in both 2009 and 2011. As The Tennessean further reported, FedEx paid an effective federal income taxrate of 4.21 percent over the five year period of the study.

Blasting the CTJ report as “compiled by a heavily biased, partisan advocacy group,” Fryt asserts that FedEx “is a full-rate taxpayer and that we pay all the taxes owed to local, state, federal and foreign governments.” Declaring that “the effective income tax rate for FedEx has been no lower than 35 percent in each of the past 20 years,” Fryt calls the analysis misleading because it takes accelerated depreciation into account (as well it should), and he criticizes The Tennessean for printing the story “without contacting us.”

What Fryt and FedEx are doing here is blaming the messenger (two of them, actually) and responding with their own conveniently misleading version of events. But the careful reader will note that something Fryt and FedEx are not doing is denying the empirical truth of the CTJ’s findings.

How is it, you may ask, that the CTJ report can show FedEx paid less than 0 percent (meaning, received a rebate) in federal income taxes in two separate years while a FedEx executive insists that “the effective income tax rate for FedEx has been no lower than 35 percent in each of the past 20 years.”? Both statements can’t be true, right? Someone must be fibbing here?

Not necessarily. The key here probably lies in Fryt’s careful wording, “the effective income tax rate for Fedex…” Note the absence of the word “federal” between “effective” and “income.” Corporations pay not just U.S. federal taxes on income, but also state as well as foreign income taxes. That same CTJ analysis reporting FedEx’s effective rate of 4.2 percent in U.S. federal income taxes between 2008 and 2012 found that the company paid a much higher rate (57.7 percent) to foreign governments on its overseas pretax income. My assumption is that FedEx is counting all forms of income tax (that omission of the word federal is presumably no accident), and in so doing hopes to lead readers to believe that the zero tax years and astoundingly low effective average federal tax rate revealed by CTJ and reported by the Tennessean are factually inaccurate. But if you read Fryt’s op-ed carefully you’ll notice that he never actually repudiates the accuracy of CTJ numbers. Why? Because he can’t.

As mentioned above, Fryt and FedEx righteously assert that the firm pays all taxes owed to all governments. This is a classically defective straw-man argument; nobody claims otherwise, and neither the CTJ analysis nor the Tennessean story intimated that FedEx isn’t meeting its obligations under the law. As far as I’m concerned FedEx is a great American company, one that treats its people well and plays by the rules. A key aim of the CTJ analysis is to show the extent to which copious loopholes and tax breaks legally enable corporations to minimize their income tax obligations.

Fryt concludes his op-ed with familiar corporate whining that U.S. corporate income tax rates are among the highest in the world, creating a tax system that “is seriously flawed and hurts U.S. economic growth and competitiveness.” He’s right that statutory corporate tax rates in the U.S. are among the world’s highest, but it’s also the case that the actual rate large profitable corporations pay is typically less than half the statutory rate.

Fryt and FedEx may not like hearing these realities when they are foisted upon them (accurately) by a “heavily biased, partisan advocacy group.” Ok, then, how about that leftist commie Warren Buffett: “It is a myth that American corporations are paying 35 percent or anything like it…corporate taxes are not strangling American competitiveness.”

A version of this post appears on the Nashville Scene‘s Pith in the Wind blog.