Big Pharma’s Taxing Situation

Khadija Sharife analyzed the public disclosures of nine pharmaceutical companies and found that collectively they have dodged paying about $140 billion in taxes by stashing $405 billion in income in offshore tax havens. Sharife also shows that the alleged cost of obtaining a patent trotted out by Big Pharma is the product of artificial expenses and mispricing. Increasingly, it’s public institutions, which are deprived of funding by pharma’s tax avoidance strategies, that overwhelmingly pay for and develop new medicines.