While jacking up drug prices, Pfizer recently reported more than $27 billion in revenue from its US sales in 2023. But the Big Pharma titan owes nothing in federal income taxes, despite being one of the most profitable pharmaceutical companies in the world. That’s largely thanks to existing loopholes and a 2017 tax law signed by former president Donald Trump.

Pfizer is not the only giant corporation raking in huge profits but paying less taxes than the typical American household: more than one hundred of the country’s most profitable corporations paid zero federal income taxes in at least one year since the Trump tax cuts were enacted.

Pfizer’s tax dodge illustrates how those corporations — in particular pharmaceutical and tech giants — are able to enjoy astonishingly low tax rates by using a system of lucrative tax loopholes. While legislation to halt such tax schemes has stalled in Congress, corporate giants often stash intellectual property rights for their drugs and other products in offshore tax havens and force their US-based operations to “buy” the rights to manufacture and sell those drugs and products here in the United States.