Sitting unnoticed on the streets of Wilmington, Delaware is a bland, two-story office building called the Corporation Trust Center, a name that is quite unfitting considering that what happens behind its glass doors are some of the least trustworthy corporate activities on the planet.
1209 North Orange Street is the legal address of a whopping 285,000 American businesses, as of 2012, making the little Corporation Trust Center the largest corporate facility in the world by number of firms. As the registered home of Google, Apple, Walmart, American Airlines, J.P. Morgan Chase, and Coca-Cola, the center is home to more businesses than there are people in Wilmington.
What draws companies to the Corporation Trust Center is not its drab, yellow brick exterior, but rather the Delaware General Corporation Law (DGCL), often referred to as the single most important corporate jurisdiction since the beginning of the 20th century. The DGCL allows corporations based in other states to file their taxes in Delaware, which has a unusually low corporate tax rate, saving companies billions in taxes.
The DGCL is so lucrative for businesses that over 300 of the Fortune 500 companies are incorporated in Delaware. It's so corporate friendly, in fact, that every year, 15% of all public corporations in the United States use the exact same building as their tax haven. These hundreds of thousands of tax-avoiding businesses include firms under the names of the two 2016 presidential candidates. Hillary Clinton—who has spoken adamantly in favor of cracking down on corporate tax havens—has received $16 million in public speaking fees and book royalties and an established firm called ZFS Holdings LLC at the Orange Street address. Republican nominee Donald Trump's Trump International Management Corp. and multiple companies associated with Trump's Manhattan condos dodge taxes through the exact same address.