...You may be asking: How is this legal? Isn’t Amazon an American company? Aren’t companies required to pay federal income tax? Hello? Amazon’s global headquarters is not in Seattle, but in the tiny landlocked nation of Luxembourg (Amazon employs more than 40,000 people in Seattle, compared to 1,500 people in Luxembourg.). The European Union has accused Luxembourg of giving illegal tax breaks to Amazon and has ordered the country to recover $295 million in back taxes from Amazon.