'How about paying your taxes?'—Walmart responds to Amazon's challenge over pay - CNBC

Amazon and Walmart are in war over worker pay — and now corporate taxes.

After Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos on Thursday issued a challenge to other retailers, not naming which ones specifically, to match Amazon's pay and benefits, Walmart has responded, albeit quietly.

"Today I challenge our top retail competitors (you know who you are!) to match our employee benefits and our $15 minimum wage. Do it! Better yet, go to $16 and throw the gauntlet back at us. It's a kind of competition that will benefit everyone," Bezos wrote in his annual letter to shareholders.

Walmart's EVP of Corporate Affairs Dan Bartlett then shared an article on Twitter Thursday morning about Amazon paying $0 in federal taxes on more than $11 billion in profits last year. He wrote: "Hey retail competitors out there (you know who you are) how about paying your taxes?"

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A representative from Amazon wasn't immediately able to comment on Bartlett's tweet.

Walmart's minimum wage of $11 an hour, set in January 2018, is still below Amazon's, which was hiked to $15 in November. But Walmart has said its average worker earns $17.55 an hour with wages and benefits. To stay competitive in the marketplace for talent, taking into consideration such a low unemployment rate in the U.S., Walmart has added perks like subsidizing the cost of higher education for its employees who've yet to earn a college degree. And it started loosening its dress code to let staffers in its stores wear blue jeans.

Meantime, before raising its minimum wage to $15 an hour, Amazon had been facing heightened criticism for its own pay disparity. Sen. Bernie Sanders went as far as introducing legislation called the "Bezos Act" to tax corporations for every dollar that their low-wage workers receive in government health-care benefits or food stamps.

When Amazon last year announced its plans to raise pay, Sanders said: "What Mr. Bezos has done today is not only enormously important for Amazon's hundreds of thousands of employees, it could well be, and I think it will be, a shot heard around the world."

But clearly, Amazon continues to come under attack for not having to pay anything to the IRS.

In 2018, Amazon paid $0 in U.S. federal income tax on more than $11 billion in profits before taxes. It also received a $129 million tax rebate from the federal government. Amazon's low tax bill mainly stemmed from the Republican tax cuts of 2017, carryforward losses from years when the company was not profitable, tax credits for massive investments in R&D and stock-based employee compensation, CNBC previously reported.

In 2018, Walmart paid over $3.2 billion in U.S. federal corporate income taxes.

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