If you get your coffee at Starbucks, you may want to ask for extra sugar. That’s because recent news about the company’s tax avoidance schemes sure leaves a bitter taste. 

The world’s largest coffee company has dodged about $1.3 billion in taxes over the past decade through the clever use of a subsidiary in Switzerland, according to a report released earlier this year. These tax shenanigans, the authors explain, deprive governments of “revenues to fund essential public services, including education, health care, infrastructure and support for vulnerable people and communities.” That may be especially true in the case of Oregon, which reportedly has more Starbucks stores per capita than any other state in the nation.

Which begs the question, how much is Starbucks paying (or avoiding) in Oregon income taxes? Unfortunately, that information is secret — at least for now. It’s high time Oregon lawmakers ended this secrecy by requiring big corporations to disclose key tax information.

Starbucks is far from alone when it comes to tax avoidance. “Tax avoidance” refers to legal means by which corporations minimize their tax bills, as opposed to “tax evasion,” which refers to illegal means.

One way corporations are able to avoid taxes is through the use of tax loopholes and subsidies. And how do these tax loopholes come into being? They come into being as a result of corporations pressuring elected officials to create these loopholes by deploying their armies of lobbyists to Congress or state capitols, or by pouring money into elections. Over the past decades, the number of tax loopholes and subsidies has exploded. Today, Oregon’s tax code has 73 different flavors of “tax expenditures,” the official name for what are commonly referred to as “tax breaks,” “tax loopholes,” or “tax subsidies.”

Another way corporations avoid taxes is through the use of offshore tax havens. In the case of Starbucks, the company set up a subsidiary in Switzerland, a notorious tax haven offering very low tax rates to multinational corporations. Starbucks uses this Swiss subsidiary to buy its green coffee. The subsidiary then jacks up the price of those coffee beans when it “sells” them to other Starbucks subsidiaries, those that sell coffee to consumers all around the world. With this trick, Starbucks is able to shift a huge portion of its profits from where they were earned — including the Starbucks in your neighborhood — to Switzerland, where those profits largely escape taxation. 

Aggressive corporate tax avoidance helps explain why corporate income taxes have failed to keep up with corporate profits. From 1980 to 2024, national corporate profits have grown nearly twice as fast as corporate income tax payments to Oregon. Five decades ago, the corporate income tax accounted for 18.5% of all income taxes collected in Oregon. Today, the corporate share is down to about 10%.

While it’s pretty clear that corporate tax avoidance is common, most of the details are shrouded in secrecy. There is no public information as to how much big corporations pay in Oregon income taxes and how they arrive at that figure. No one knows for sure which corporations benefit from which tax breaks. And we can only guess which hugely profitable multinational corporations pay Oregon’s meager corporate minimum tax.

That is why enacting corporate tax transparency is a crucial step for increasing accountability and fairness in Oregon’s tax system. Transparency means requiring corporations to make certain basic information public, including their total sales in Oregon, the income taxes they paid, and the tax breaks they used.

Transparency is right for Oregonians. Enacting it would allow us to understand what, if any, benefit working families get in return for all the corporate tax breaks on the books. It would discourage corporate tax avoidance, as some companies would want to avoid bad publicity. At the very least, it would allow Oregonians to vote with their dollars, choosing to do business with corporations they view as supporting the common good.

Finally, tax transparency would give policymakers and the public information to assess whether, as corporations like to argue, their taxes are too high or whether a particular change in tax policy would hurt their bottom line.

Corporate tax avoidance and its bitter aftertaste are the house blend right now. It’s time for a long-overdue cup of transparency.