Most striking, of course, is that Eli Lilly & Co. ($LLY) paid a staggering $6.6 billion in taxes to Ireland — more than 55 percent of all Irish taxes that U.S. filers reported last year! No other firm comes close; Pfizer ($PFE) is a distant second at $1.06 billion, and everyone else trails behind.   

Also notice that among the 10 firms listed above, eight are in pharmaceuticals, life sciences, or medical devices. That’s because Ireland is also a lucrative place to stow your intellectual property, such as patents for drugs or medical devices.

Analysts can use Calcbench to research similar tax data, either by company (“Where is this company paying taxes around the world?”) or by country (“Which companies are paying taxes to this particular country?”). 

You can also use the data to discern which filers are paying a significant share of a country’s corporate taxes (as seen in the tables above), although beware that such an analysis only goes so far. For example, a country might also collect lots of corporate tax revenue from businesses that aren’t U.S. filers, which wouldn’t be reflected in our tables today. 

Likewise, U.S. filers only need to report country-specific tax payments when those payments are 5 percent or more of the company’s total taxes. Payments below that 5 percent threshold can be lumped together into one “unidentified” category — which, as we noted in a previous post, is the single largest destination for all U.S. files in total. So maybe lots of companies are making payments to Ireland or Switzerland, but the amounts are hidden in that Unidentified item. 

Nevertheless, tax management is an important part of corporate finance and corporate strategy. The new disclosures arriving this year provide a valuable window into how companies think about taxes, and all that insight is now ready for consumption here at Calcbench.