Knowing that the tax laws allow large corporations to get a refund of prior year taxes when they have a loss I asked my accountant about it. His response was that it would cost far more to file the paperwork than what the refund would be.
This here is the real zinger.
Almost everything that these large corporations do which results in them realising such lower effective tax rates -- lower than small businesses, and lower than even lowly paid employees -- is LEGAL, however EXPENSIVE to achieve.
Let's say the professional advice, off-shore entities, and expenses for submitting paperwork to government departments costs a million dollars a year (I plucked that number out of the air): a company would need revenue many times that to make it worth all the effort. So existing laws -- which make such behaviour legal -- favour larger corporations.
It's the same with family trusts in Australia: they're legal financial instruments that "coincidentally" allow people to decimate their income tax obligations. Unfortunately, they're also a little costly to establish and maintain, so only wealthy people end-up using them.
NONE of these laws are by chance ... I believe they're DELIBERATELY DESIGNED to benefit the wealthy.