I guess I'm not clear on what detail you think is missing. To me, their objections and actions are very clearly worded.
I believe they pointed out that they regularly pay taxes, that the tax rate for that year was due to accelerating depreciation, and the NYT is engaged in the same accounting strategies.
Accelerating depreciation has no net tax benefit over the full depreciation period. If the depreciation period is 10 years, but they accelerate in the first year, their net tax rate is the same over the 10 years as if they did not accelerate. They are simply moving their tax burden to the future.
They also took other current expenses to charge their pension, but again, these are expenses that they cannot take in the future - they will pay additional tax on future incomes. The net is the same.
It’s quite clear that some people’s model of taxes comes from doing Turbo Tax, year after year. Even Bernie Sanders does his own taxes. A man that wants to set the tax agenda on multinational corporations.
Just because a company pays zero taxes doesn’t mean that there was any thing fraudulent going on. If there’s zero taxes there’s probably incentives, depreciating assets as you described, losses carried forward, the corporate tax cut, employee stock compensation.
This coincidentally also describes the NYTs piece which was also misleading, bordering on activism.
> As for capital investments, the company spent less in the 2018 fiscal year than it had projected in December 2017, before the tax law passed. It spent even less in 2019. Much of its savings have gone to reward shareholders: FedEx spent more than $2 billion on stock buybacks and dividend increases in the 2019 fiscal year, up from $1.6 billion in 2018, and more than double the amount the company spent on buybacks and dividends in fiscal year 2017.
edit: Note: the parent commenter ninja-edited in the word "essentially" after I made this comment.
I'd say that paragraph you quoted showcases the misleading writing very nicely.
$2.6,$3.4,$3.6,$3.6,$3.3,$3.8,$5.0,$5.0,$5.1,$5.6
Do you think the article fairly reflects the trends in the company's capital expenditures?
FedEx's lobbying efforts argued reduced taxes would allow them to increase capital spending more than they would have otherwise. Instead, they look to have stuck to their trendline - and 2019's estimated is flat.
Draw those numbers on a chart and it doesn't look like the tax cut generated much of a boost: https://marketrealist.imgix.net/uploads/2018/09/Capex-2.png?...
Article from which the chart is drawn: https://articles2.marketrealist.com/2018/09/a-look-at-fedexs...
Yes, FedEx didn't follow up with the massive new boosts they promised (besides the pension fund). However, the NYT should have included figures and stated it how you are in your comment - that growth factor is what has gone down, not the actual level of investment.
I am not disputing what you say about FedEx, I just want NYT to be more careful and precise in its reporting.
They've been building 800,000 square feet of new sort facility at IND for a year and change...
https://www.indystar.com/story/news/2018/01/26/fedex-credits...
https://bgabuilders.com/fedex-indianapolis-ob4-project/
It's huge and runs right along side Interstate 70, you can see it from the other side of the airport just off of U.S. 40.
I can walk to my car, drive about 10 yards out of my work parking lot and see it across the airport. It's very real and almost certainly didn't grow out of the ground on its own accord.
They're also expanding in Greenwood, Indiana.
They're also expanding at MEM.
...
https://marketrealist.imgix.net/uploads/2018/09/Capex-2.png?... indicates their spending growth has largely just stayed what it was prior to the tax changes.
The fact that they instead increased stock buybacks etc. demonstrates a point of detractors of the tax law - that it's proceeds would most likely go back into already-wealthy pockets, not capital investment. It's not unreasonable to point it out here.
Take that out & how does it look?
The tell is that FedEx calls the NYT article "factually incorrect" but never states exactly what assertions they dispute.
It's as if they want the reader and the media to infer that FedEx actually did pay taxes on billions in profit, or that FedEx actually did increase their investments as the phony rationale for the tax cut promised.
But since FedEx never actually says any of that, and instead just tries to infer it through clever wording, I'm going to trust NYT over this corporate snow job.
When FedEx twists the argument to accuse the NYT of also not increasing their capital investments, the whole thing reeks of Facebook's disinfo campaign to "deny and deflect" fundamentally factual reporting.