"When Jeff Bezos was looking for a home for his fledgling online bookseller, amazon.com, in 1994, his first choice is said to have been a Native American reservation. The location would have presented generous tax breaks if the state of California had not intervened and halted the plan.
Next stop was Seattle, which Bezos said he selected because Washington state had – among other things – a smallish population. At the time only those retailers with a physical presence in a state paid sales taxes, so a home state with a small population meant the lowest possible sales tax burden. Sales made into other more populous states would not be taxed.
It was a strategic decision that would characterise Amazon’s attitude towards paying tax over the next two decades. Its critics allege that it owes its position as the world’s largest online retailer in part to its use of contrived and artificial tax arrangements that – while legal – endow it with competitive advantages no bricks-and-mortar retailer could ever hope to enjoy.
The company deployed the strategy in Luxembourg, the tiny European country that became, in the words of the Tax Justice Network, “the Death Star of financial secrecy” in a national bid to attract capital through tax competition.
The architect of that transformation, Jean-Claude Juncker, later became the president of the European commission, and has been dogged by questions about his suitability for the post in an atmosphere of increasing anger about tax avoidance ever since."
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2018/apr/25/from-seattle-to-luxembourg-how-tax-schemes-shaped-amazon
Next stop was Seattle, which Bezos said he selected because Washington state had – among other things – a smallish population. At the time only those retailers with a physical presence in a state paid sales taxes, so a home state with a small population meant the lowest possible sales tax burden. Sales made into other more populous states would not be taxed.
It was a strategic decision that would characterise Amazon’s attitude towards paying tax over the next two decades. Its critics allege that it owes its position as the world’s largest online retailer in part to its use of contrived and artificial tax arrangements that – while legal – endow it with competitive advantages no bricks-and-mortar retailer could ever hope to enjoy.
The company deployed the strategy in Luxembourg, the tiny European country that became, in the words of the Tax Justice Network, “the Death Star of financial secrecy” in a national bid to attract capital through tax competition.
The architect of that transformation, Jean-Claude Juncker, later became the president of the European commission, and has been dogged by questions about his suitability for the post in an atmosphere of increasing anger about tax avoidance ever since."
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2018/apr/25/from-seattle-to-luxembourg-how-tax-schemes-shaped-amazon