Since someone needs to call bullshit on this discussion, I would like to point out that GS's 2008 income was roughly 94% lower than its 2007 income. In 2007 its tax liability was roughly 35% of pretax income. Good tax accountants can lower your liability, but there is no magic "get out of taxes" card besides losing money.

I'm not going to spend more time looking through the 2008 quarterlies, but I would guess they lost money in some of those quarters, creating a tax benefit. If you find that shocking, well I can also give you amazing advice to lower your tax rate to 0% but you may not enjoy it.

In 2009, Goldman's pretax earnings returned to its historical range and the company again paid ~30% income taxes. These financials are all public, you can look at them on the internet.

Why it's so hard to digest this? GS is so successful and so hated for certain reasons, and that's one of them.

I do expect a Public Corporation to minimize their tax liability. I would have not been surprised if they minimized their effective tax from 35% to 25%, or even 15%. But going from 35% to 1% is rather surprising. I guess their Corporate Tax team got some real nice bonus for 2008.