Senate Finance Chair Ron Wyden (D-OR) recently joined 13 colleagues in detailing the Taxing Big Oil Profiteers Act, which seeks to address oil company profiteering.
“Our broken tax code is working for Big Oil, not American families. While Americans pay more to fill up their gas tanks, Big Oil companies are raking in record profits, rewarding their CEOs and wealthy shareholders with massive stock buybacks, and using special loopholes in the tax code to pay next to nothing in taxes,” Wyden said. “Our tax code should benefit the American people, not oil executives and their wealthy shareholders. Our Taxing Big Oil Profiteers Act would help reverse perverse incentives to price gouge by doubling the corporate tax rate on companies’ excess profits, eliminating egregious buybacks, and reducing accounting tricks.”
Companies providing relief to consumers by reducing prices or investing in new supplies would not be impacted by the legislation.
The bill imposes a 25 percent excise tax on stock repurchased by the corporation while closing a loophole, enabling oil companies to game the value of their inventories by using an accounting method ensuring they are deducting the newest, most expensive inventory rather than the oldest, least expensive inventory.
“What we’re proposing here is pretty simple—giant oil and gas corporations shouldn’t be profiting off a crisis at the expense of people in Washington state who are just trying to fill up their cars to get to work, pick up their kids, and get around,” said U.S. Sen. Patty Murray (D-WA), a co-sponsor of the bill.