The article is sarcastic rebuttal: Exxon has brilliant tax accountants and attorneys who classify collecting and paying transactional taxes such as sales tax and gasoline tax as the other 7.7B in taxes paid to the US govt. They actually received a $46M refund. Sure would be nice for individuals too! Imagine being allowed to report all sales taxes paid as income tax paid and the ability to use pre-tax dollars for all expenditures. ie. Just tax me on the amount of cash I sock away in savings or don't spend each year and allow me a tax credit for all the transactional taxes I've paid in the year. If I made $100K pretax... spent 80K paying $8K in transactional taxes (sales/gas/telecom etc.) I'd gladly pay a 40% tax on my unspent $20K... My tax bill is still zero after taking my 8K tax credit. Our tax code is just a sophisticated version of 3 card monty. "What the financial statement says is that ExxonMobil, in 2009, after a handful of deferrals, recorded a total U.S. income tax benefit (i.e., a refund) of $46 million. Next to this, it shows total non-U.S. income taxes of $15.165 billion. My mistake was in thinking that these figures somehow reflected actual tax benefits and liabilities. So what we should have written was that ExxonMobil ârecordedâ no U.S. income taxes for 2009 instead of âpaid.â All you re-bloggers out there, please note the clarification. Mea culpa. And for all you commenters outraged that Exxon isnât paying taxes in the U.S., donât worry, it is. Our article only focused on income taxes, but itâs worth noting that the 10-k also records $7.7 billion in other taxes in the U.S. (like sales taxes) and more than $50 billion of other taxes and duties paid (I mean recorded) overseas."