Well, there they are. Pretty much the worst six words any stock could have in a news release. It's true though, and it turns out it's not a very recent development. Amazon (AMZN) revealed in their last 10-K that the company is being investigated for their accounting practices as far back as 2005. Auditors suggest that Amazon has been masking the profits they are making by sending money to their overseas operations and lumping the costs together as R&D. Right now, auditors have Amazon in court trying to squeeze them for $1.5 billion in taxes that they say they owe the IRS. This is only for the years 2005-2006. Amazon has been using this method of accounting since that time, so that could potentially result in fines in the neighborhood of $750 million per year for every year since that time. That might not seem too severe for a company with a $300 billion market cap, but Amazon has struggled to eek out any kind of profit every year since they started. That could translate into adjusted earnings reports showing losses for two decades. Creditors and investors would be much less likely to continue Amazon cheap money to keep growing what is essentially the world's largest money pit. Amazon has had sharp drops in their stock price in the past. From 1999-2001 the stock fell by 90%. Nothing has changed in this company's fundamentals except the stories that Jeff Bezos, the CEO tells the media. From where we are today, near an all-time high in the stock price, this would mean a loss of value of $270 billion to shareholders.