Amazon Will Pay Zero Tax For 2018, Trump’s Tax Cuts Act To Blame

[Correction: A previous version of this article misstated the net worth of Jeff Bezos.]

For the second straight year, Amazon.com, the world’s largest e-commerce and cloud computing firm, will pay zero ($0.00) in taxes to the U.S. federal government.

Amazon reported revenues of $239.2 billion and a taxable net income of $11.2 billion in 2018. Its taxable income of $11.2 billion was almost twice the $5.6 billion it reported in 2017.

Despite these enormous numbers, Amazon will wind-up paying nothing in taxes due to its skill at exploiting loopholes in the tax code. For the 2018 tax year, Amazon also went to town on the enormous tax cuts bestowed on it by Trump’s Tax Cuts and Jobs Act (TCJA) of 2017.

Thanks to the TCJA, Amazon’s federal tax responsibility fell to 21 percent from 35 percent in 2017, said a report from the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy (ITEP). And with the help of tax credits, loopholes, exemptions, TCJA and other loopholes, Amazon won’t even pay a single cent to the government, said ITEP.

Amazon reported $5.6 billion in profits in 2017 and paid $0.00 taxes, as well.

“It’s hard to know exactly what they’re doing,” said Steve Wamhoff, ITEP’s Director of Federal Tax Policy.

“In their public documents they don’t lay out their tax strategy. So it’s unclear exactly which breaks (Amazon is taking advantage of). They vaguely say tax credits. One could think of many different ways a corporation could do this, like the depreciation breaks which were expanded under TCJA.”

ITEP explained that TCJA slashed the statutory corporate tax rate from 35 percent to 21 percent. In addition to the lower tax rates for corporations, TCJA also "failed to ... close a slew of tax loopholes that allow profitable companies to routinely avoid paying federal and state income taxes on almost half of their profits," according to ITEP senior fellow Matthew Gardner.

Amazon’s brazen exploitation of TCJA means it will pay a -1 percent federal income tax rate this year after paying a federal rate of more than 11 percent between 2011 and 2016. Adding insult to injury, Amazon will receive a federal tax refund of $129 million this year due to a combination of tax credits and deductions. Amazon received a far larger refund of $137 million last year.

Gardner said Amazon's own income tax disclosure in its quarterly report reveals the company's non-payment of income tax this year is partly due to "various unspecified 'tax credits'." Also aiding Amazon’s tax avoidance is its right to deduct the value of vested shares the company gives to its employees, including stock options given to executives.

Amazon's actual tax filings to the IRS are not public. Because of this secrecy, there is no way of knowing exactly how large a deduction Amazon gets from writing off vested stock options, or the value of the tax credits it receives from the government, said Gardner.

And it goes without saying that Amazon founder and CEO Jeff Bezos is the richest person on Earth with a net worth of $113.3 billion.