Enormous profits aren't enough for Walmart. It's not enough that the company's main owners, the Walton family, are billionaires many times over. According to a new report from Americans for Tax Fairness, Walmart is also sheltering $76 billion in assets in 78 subsidiaries located in 15 tax haven countries where Walmart doesn't even have stores. What's more, Walmart has effectively hidden all these subsidiaries by not listing them in the part of its Securities and Exchange Commission forms where they're supposed to be listed (the part where it says "subsidiaries"), instead burying any mention of them as deeply as it can.

Walmart is getting out of major taxes through these maneuvers. Take Luxembourg. Walmart has $64 billion in assets stashed in 22 shell companies—five of which were established in 2015 alone. Those assets in Luxembourg generate big profits and teeny tiny taxes. Walmart isn't just parking the money in places with low taxes and leaving it there, though:



During the first half of 2014, Walmart took $2.4 billion in low-interest, short-term loans from subsidiaries in tax havens, thereby providing Walmart affiliates in the United States access to foreign earnings without paying U.S. tax, which may transgress the intent of U.S. law.

Walmart generates about $1.5 billion worth of tax deductions in Luxembourg each

year by making phantom interest payments to Wal-Mart International Holdings, Inc.

in the United States. By using what tax planners call a hybrid loan, Walmart effectively

makes this income disappear for tax purposes in both Luxembourg and the United

States.

This is all on top of Walmart's billions in share buybacks enrich the Walton family while the company pays its workers poverty wages, and the "performance pay" bonuses for top executives that let the company avoid tens of millions in taxes here in the U.S. No wonder Walmart's reputation is rock bottom.