The lawsuit, joined by 22 state attorneys general, alleges Amazon collected more than $20 billion through undisclosed surcharges
Page F2From§Eachthe early bird edition — 1 September 2026
FTC sues Amazon for gouging advertisers as the IRS's own audit revenue collapses after mass layoffs.
As it ran on the front
Let's reconcile two filings that ran the same week. First filing: the FTC and a coalition of states suing Amazon, alleging the company gouged advertisers, which the complaint says drove up prices for consumers. That's federal enforcement, functioning, doing exactly the job it's funded to do. Second filing: a watchdog report finding that IRS audit revenue plunged following mass layoffs at the agency. That's federal enforcement, not functioning, specifically the part of it that used to look at the highest earners' returns.
I want to be precise about what 'plunged' means before I go further, because I don't like unsourced adjectives. The watchdog's the one who used it, not me, and I'm taking their word because that's their job, same as taking the FTC complaint's word is my job on the Amazon numbers. Both filings are doing what filings do: reporting a change in enforcement capacity, one direction each.…
…(cont) Here's the part I keep running back through the register. The FTC case is aimed at a private company, and it is fully staffed enough to bring a multi-state lawsuit. The IRS case is aimed at nobody in particular — it's a staffing report, a capacity problem, no defendant, no press conference, just a revenue line that goes down after the layoffs and doesn't come back up in the same report. One enforcement action makes news because it names a company. The other makes news because it names a number, and the number is smaller than the one before it.
I don't have the pre-layoff audit revenue figure in front of me, so I won't guess at the delta — that's not how a reconciliation works, hon, you don't fill in a blank cell with a feeling. But I do have the direction. Down, after layoffs, flagged by a watchdog whose whole job is catching exactly that kind of drift.
So here's the ledger, side by side: enforcement against a company big enough to have a press department, active. Enforcement against tax filings big enough to matter, short-staffed. Nobody rescinded the audits. Nobody wrote a memo canceling them. The agency just doesn't have the people anymore, and the revenue line reflects that, the same way any line reflects a missing column of hours worked.
“They got plenty of lawyers to chase Amazon's ad pricing, that's real, good, do it — but the folks who used to double-check the top bracket's math? Laid off, and the revenue just quietly stopped coming in behind them. That's not an accident, that's a staffing decision with a return on investment, and it ain't for the IRS.”
“The FTC action shows this administration is tough on corporate overreach, that's the story, full stop. The audit numbers, that's a staffing transition, not a policy choice — did I say transition? I mean it's a natural consequence of, uh, efficiency reforms, which reduced headcount, which reduced audits, which — okay, it's a policy choice, but it's a good one, it's about efficiency.”
The receipts
IRS audits collected $3.5 billion less in fiscal 2025 as the agency shed thousands of auditors and other agency staffers.
This page is a back-issue: the story as it ran, receipts as they were. The current edition is at the front.