A lot of a tax return is just huge reams of supporting documentation (accountings of expenditures, etc). Also, keep in mind the scale of the endeavor. $150bn in revenus accounted for in 57,000 pages. I.e. 1 page of documentation for $2.63m in revenue. How much did it cost to generate and analyze? $10m? $50m? At $50m that's an overhead of 0.03%, for an inevitable part of running a modern society. Seems way less inefficient when you put it in context.

Ultimately, economic growth comes from growth in productivity, i.e. making stuff people want. We seem to be riding an ever-increasing complexity of arbitrary systems, including tax laws, financial regulations, healthcare regulations, etc. that is drawing an ever greater share of the time and talents of the well-educated workforce into the world's largest game of Dungeons & Dragons against each other, and not making anything that anyone wants.

What would happen if corporate taxes were lowered to zero, but capital gains were taxed as ordinary income? Corporations are not people, etc., and maybe taxes should only be imposed when they actually enter a human being's possession.

Given the vast size and complexity of GE's business, I don't really think 57,000 pages is unreasonable. Who knows how many hundreds of sub-units they might have, foreign entities, etc.

At $150 billion of revenue, that's $2,631,578.95 of revenue per page. Which is better than most tax filers have to deal with.

Especially when, as a result, they save billions of dollars in tax payments.

I thought this whole story was debunked a while ago along the lines of GE bringing forward their losses from the previous tax year, which is why they paid no tax

If you'd really like to dive deep into GE's filing try taking at look at it as a tagged XML file using XBRL at http://www.sec.gov/cgi-bin/viewer?action=view&cik=40554&...

You can also download the data as an Excel Spreadsheet - they may obfuscate as much as they want - but if you start leveraging the XBRL tags - you can automate search for that incriminating needle in a haystack...

This is what the SEC auditors are doing these days1

We need an alternative minimum tax for corporations. If this is OK for individuals it should be just fine for billion-dollar businesses.

This is one of the most sublimely hilarious and soul-crushing things I've read recently. It's like an Onion article.

Anyone know where to find this 57,000 page PDF?

This blogger is, as usual, arguing that the corporate tax code is somehow too complex.

Rather what is happening is that GE is intentionally gaming the system. Most of those 57,000 pages are self-inflicted. If GE refrained from tax-dodging activity and only undertook regular business activity, their tax return would be much, much thinner.

http://money.cnn.com/2010/04/16/news/companies/ge_7000_tax_r...

A few lines of patching to the tax code to require that income earned in the U.S. be taxed in the U.S. would fix the majority of the problem. Literally a couple of sentences.

possibly one of the best hacks of 2011

"Consider the resources that GE spends to lowers its tax bill... Indeed, a corporate tax system with a tax rate of zero could well be preferable as it would waste fewer resources and raise not much less revenue."

Or you could just pay your taxes, GE

The only way to prevent this is to move to a sales tax model. Anything else can be gamed ad nauseum as GE & co have so helpfully proved. With today's tax system, the amount of taxes you pay are inversely proportional to the amount of complexity you're willing to deal with.

And since corporations are legally people, you're barking up the wrong tree with conversations about not taxing businesses. Sales tax it, period. Cannot be circumvented.