Because of the corporate tax cut, massive corporations like Amazon, which is valued at nearly $800 billion, will pay $0 in federal taxes this year. In fact, the company is expecting a federal refund of nearly $129 billion. This essentially puts Amazon at a federal income tax rate of -1 percent this year, after paying a federal rate of more than 11 percent from 2011 to 2016. This is the second year in a row that Amazon has not paid any federal taxes. The Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy (ITEP) suggests that this is due to a combination of the corporate tax cut and a loophole that allows corporations to avoid paying state and federal taxes on roughly half their income.

Amazon is not a passive player in tax law, says ITEP’s Matthew Gardner, who researched and wrote the Amazon report. “Amazon in particular has shaped tax law in its own image. They made the laws by lobbying so persistently and effectively,” Gardner tells Axios.

“This is tax avoidance, not tax evasion. There’s no indication of any wrongdoing, except on the part of Congress,” said Matthew Gardner, senior fellow at the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy, a liberal think tank.
US tax code allows money-losing companies to reduce their future taxable income.

One central idea of Trump’s tax cuts was to cut corporate tax rates from 35% to 21% but as the tax filings come in it is becoming increasingly clear that many companies are not even paying the lower rate, Matthew Gardner said. “You can’t lay the blame too much on Congress,” said Gardner. “It wasn’t Congress that came up with these ideas. They are the product of a lobbying blitz from these companies. These companies wrote the law in many cases.”