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Comment by jakelazaroff | Hacker News Reader

> “We pay every penny we owe in corporate taxes including $2.6 billion over the past three years,” Amazon said when reached for comment. “We’ve invested $270 billion in the US since 2010 and created more than 275,000 jobs.”

Does "every penny we owe" mean what a layperson would think, or does it mean their lawyers used every weird loophole they could find to make sure they "owe" nothing at all?

The second part of the quote is irrelevant. It's nice that they're creating jobs, but they're only mentioning that to essentially bribe us into accepting being swindled out of money they owe. Just pay your taxes!

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The investment and jobs they produce clearly contribute directly and indirectly to the treasury, so commenting that when asked about an alleged failure to pay one specific kind of tax sounds relevant.

You say “just pay your taxes”. What is the amount at which you would believe they are doing just that? What is the standard for which someone who we think isn’t paying their taxes should have their tax returns publicized? (I say punlicized because the IRS already has a mandate to audit, and Congress has statutory authority to request them, so presumably what’s left is publicizing them? I appreciate that’s not what you said though :-))

"Every penny we owe" would presumably mean to a layperson "every penny legally required by the tax code," which I think is how Amazon intended it.

Built into that meaning would be an incorrect understanding of the tax code, which I think one can say is purposefully being leveraged in PR statements like this. Which is to say they are purposefully being misleading.

How would you propose they rewrite it?

For PR it works sufficiently as is. My criticism of the statement is not in its effectiveness and I don't think any resolution of my criticism would allow them to keep the original goal of the statement.

How is an "incorrect understanding of the tax code" built into that statement? Are you saying that the average layperson doesn't understand the numbers shuffling that goes on to get the biggest deduction? All tax preparation advertisements I see on TV tout their ability to "get you the biggest refund". Why would it not be a safe assumption to apply that same thought to corporate taxes?

Because when people interpret some behavior being done to the legal extent possible, on average they will do so with a poor understanding of the law and their interpretations will assume behavior which is in line with how they think the law works, not how it actually works. While this is their own misunderstanding, it is common enough and exploited purposefully enough that I don't think one can just declare Caveat Emptor (assuming that to buy into something is also a valid translation, which is probably isn't).

It would be also nice to know how much that $270 billion investment cost the tax payer. Only earlier this year an attempt by Amazon to build new headquarters in New York fell through because it hinged on a $3 billion tax break and allowing them to bypass local processes.

It hinged on tax breaks that, as I understand things, are overwhelmingly available to any other business seeking to locate/expand in the jurisdiction. It seemed like only the real estate portion was project-specific (and is likely to be offered to the next user as well).

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