The Times business section carries an article by Charles Duhigg and David Kocieniewski that is skewed to argue that Apple doesn't pay as much American tax as the Times seems to think it should pay.
Here is the way the Times article frames it: "Apple's domestic tax bill has drawn the interest of corporate tax experts and policy makers because although the majority of Apple's executives, product designers, marketers, employees, research and development operations and retail stores are in the United States, in the past Apple's accountants have found legal ways to allocate about 70 percent of the company's profits overseas, where tax rates are often much lower, according to corporate filings."
What the Times article doesn't report is that, according to Apple's annual report for 2012 (See "Note 8"), of the company's total net sales for 2012 of $156,508 million, $60,949 million were in the United States, while $95,559 million were in China and other countries. In other words, 61% of Apple's sales were overseas.
Another thing the Times article doesn't report is that in 2012 (See "Note 5" of the annual report), Apple's provision for U.S. income taxes was $13,317 million (about $12 billion federal and about $1 billion state). Its provision for foreign taxes was $713 million.
In other words, here is a company that is doing 61% of its business overseas, but only paying 5% of its taxes overseas. It's doing 39% of its sales in the United States, but it's paying 95% of its taxes in the United States. And the complaint of Senator Carl Levin, Democrat of Michigan, echoed in a New York Times front of the business section article, is that Apple is underpaying American taxes? It's ridiculous. If anyone has a justifiable complaint here, it's the foreign countries, who might reasonably argue that Apple is paying too great of a share of its taxes in the United States, and not enough in the other places it makes money.
The only human being identified in the Times article other than Senator Levin is Martin A. Sullivan, identified by the Times only as "a former Treasury Department economist." Mr. Sullivan worked at the Treasury Department from 1986 to 1988. That's two years, 25 years ago. What he's done for the past 17 years is work at a firm called Tax Analysts, which because it's organized as a non-profit, is tax exempt at the corporate level even though it rakes in lots of money by operating a publishing business selling high-priced subscription-only newsletters to tax lawyers. Mr. Sullivan, like Senator Levin and, apparently, the Times reporters, seems to want Apple to pay more in U.S. taxes.
The article includes a quote from Apple saying the company pays a lot of taxes, but Apple, unlike Senator Levin, doesn't get the benefit of quote in the article from an economist cheering on its point of view.