Tax law is quite complex. Even for taxes based on profits, it is non-trivial to tie patterns of revenue and expense to particular tax jurisdictions (much less

Tax law is quite complex. Even for taxes based on profits, it is non-trivial to tie patterns of revenue and expense to particular tax jurisdictions (much less particular geographical locations). This is particularly true in the age of e-commerce - did the revenue occur where the purchaser clicked an icon, where a server received the buy message, where a server recorded/confirmed the transaction, where a bank sent/received currency, where a warehouse dispatched an item (what if it's a digital item), where the item was received, all of the above, some of the above depending on ever shifting tax law in multiple jurisdictions? There are more and different questions related to expenses. For example, should it have some relationship to where employees are located? Armies of people work every day to prevent upsetting some tax jurisdiction while minimizing tax expense. It's a sisyphean task. Compared to Amazon's revenues, $250m is a rounding error, so they have very good accountants working for them.