The Supreme Court Makes A Federal Case Out Of South Dakota's Inability To Collect Taxes From Its Residents And Thus A Big Mess
from the aereo-for-ecommerce dept
In some ways the Supreme Court's decision last week in South Dakota v. Wayfair may seem like a small thing: it simply overturned an earlier decision, Quill Corp v. North Dakota, which had concluded that states could not impose requirements to collect sales tax on businesses with no physical presence in the state. But in dispensing with that rule, the decision invited broader effects that may not be so small, thanks to the alarming reasoning the Court used to justify it.
The Court was prompted to reverse its earlier decision – something that the Supreme Court does but rarely, thanks to the principle of stare decisis that ordinarily discourages the Court from messing with an earlier precedent – for a few reasons. In particular it was concerned that Internet businesses without a physical presence in the state had an advantage over those with one [p.12-13], and it accepted South Dakota's claims that it was losing out on millions of dollars in sales tax revenue when South Dakotans bought things from out-of-state Internet businesses who were not collecting the sales taxes that normally would have been owed [p.2].
These assumptions, if true, would raise reasonable policy concerns. But even if they were valid worries, it doesn't follow that the Supreme Court should be the organ of government to address them, especially not when its doing so threatens to create additional policy concerns of its own.
First, South Dakota may be heavily dependent on sales tax to generate revenue, but that's its choice. If consumption taxes turn out to be an inadequate way of filling its coffers, it could choose to impose other forms of taxation, like an income tax, as many other states have. It is not dependent on the United States Supreme Court to help it balance its budget.
Second, like other states, South Dakota requires its residents to independently submit to the state the sales tax that would have been collected, had they bought their goods from an Internet business with a physical presence there. ("If for some reason the sales tax is not remitted by the seller, then instate consumers are separately responsible for paying a use tax at the same rate." [p.2]). The Court may have been correct in observing that enforcing these sorts of payment requirements may be difficult [p.2], but just because it is difficult does not mean that it should fall to the United States Supreme Court to relieve the state of its enforcement burden – especially not an enforcement burden against parties over whom the state already had undisputed jurisdictional reach. This case essentially seems to boil down to South Dakota complaining, "We can't make our residents, who are clearly subject to our laws, pay their taxes, so please make sure that out-of-state residents, who are not clearly subject to our laws, do instead." And the court was amenable to this plea. [p.13]
As for whether the physical presence rule truly gave an advantage to out-of-state businesses, if the state could manage to get its residents to pay the taxes they owe the answer would be no, since any price advantage an out-of-state business could offer would have been negated by the subsequent payment obligation. But the problem with the Supreme Court having now changed the rule is that it's placed its thumb firmly on the other side of the scale and disadvantaged out-of-state businesses in favor of those with a physical presence.
In terms of sales tax collection, in and of itself it's no small task. States rarely have one tax rate applicable to the whole state, or to all types of goods. True, as the Court notes, South Dakota "is one of more than 20 States that have adopted the Streamlined Sales and Use Tax Agreement."
This system standardizes taxes to reduce administrative and compliance costs: It requires a single, state level tax administration, uniform definitions of products and services, simplified tax rate structures, and other uniform rules. It also provides sellers access to sales tax administration software paid for by the State. Sellers who choose to use such software are immune from audit liability. [p.23]
Such an agreement may certainly aid in minimizing compliance costs. So might the reasonably-priced software that the Court glibly assumes may eventually "make it easier for small businesses to cope with these problems." [p.21]. But in the here and now, compliance is still not so simple. This decision will still reach the other 30 states that have not adopted the Streamlined Sales and Use Tax Agreement, and figuring out how to comply will be more feasible for some businesses than others. Larger companies, for instance, will have more resources to manage complex compliance requirements. Companies large enough, or local enough, to have a presence in these states will also be more familiar with the state and its compliance requirements generally, since they will need to comply with the state's other laws as well.
Which leads to a more significant question raised by this decision, whose holding won't be confined to sales tax collection: what about these other state laws? Per the logic of the decision, can states impose other compliance obligations on Internet businesses, in addition to tax collection ones? As we've seen in recent discussions around Section 230, including in the cases involving Airbnb/Homeaway and Armslist, states love to apply local law to the Internet. In fact, even before the Internet states liked to impose local law whenever they could. The "long-arm" reach of states to impose their regulatory power on out-of-state parties has traditionally been limited by the requirement that the foreign party at least have some minimum contact with the state before they can be exposed to its jurisdiction. Which is why the physical presence rule made sense: being physically there suggested there was a significant enough contact between the party being regulated and the state doing the regulating. It also seemed more fair: in-state companies will also likely have in-state employees able to wield political pressure on the state government if the laws it passes to apply to their employers starts threatening their employment. Whereas out-of-state companies have no such political leverage to wield over the regulators they are nonetheless beholden to.
What the Court seems to be saying now is that lesser contact with a state than physical presence may be sufficient to establish minimum contact. In and of itself, such an assertion may not be controversial, and if the decision's rationale had been focused on those indicia it might not be so disquieting. In terms of the South Dakota taxation law itself, the law does incorporate some limitations so that it won't apply to Internet businesses with only incidental connections to South Dakota.
The Act applies only to sellers that, on an annual basis, deliver more than $100,000 of goods or services into the State or engage in 200 or more separate transactions for the delivery of goods or services into the State."[p.3]
But the Court is not specific as to what sort of lesser contact will be sufficient to subject an Internet business to state jurisdiction for taxation or otherwise, and it is going to be really expensive for out-of-state Internet businesses to find out.
Furthermore, the hostility that the Court showed to these out-of-state businesses is worrying. First, it is unjustifiably dismissive to the utility of the physical presence requirement.
The argument, moreover, that the physical presence rule is clear and easy to apply is unsound. Attempts to apply the physical presence rule to online retail sales are proving unworkable. States are already confronting the complexities of defining physical presence in the Cyber Age. For example, Massachusetts proposed a regulation that would have defined physical presence to include making apps available to be downloaded by in-state residents and placing cookies on in-state residents’ web browsers. Ohio recently adopted a similar standard. Some States have enacted so-called “click through” nexus statutes, which define nexus to include out-of-state sellers that contract with in-state residents who refer customers for compensation. Others still, like Colorado, have imposed notice and reporting requirements on out-of-state retailers that fall just short of actually collecting and remitting the tax. Statutes of this sort are likely to embroil courts in technical and arbitrary disputes about what counts as physical presence. [p. 19-20]
Of course, far from impugning the physical presence rule, these examples demonstrate the wisdom of it, because in all the examples described any dispute that might arise would arise because the states are trying to target businesses that aren't actually physically present in their states.
In fact, in general the Court seems to have an uneasy notion of what constitutes physical presence by an Internet business:
For example, a company with a website accessible in South Dakota may be said to have a physical presence in the State via the customers’ computers. A website may leave cookies saved to the customers’ hard drives, or customers may download the company’s app onto their phones. Or a company may lease data storage that is permanently, or even occasionally, located in South Dakota. Cf. United States v. Microsoft Corp., 584 U. S. ___ (2018). [p.15]
The Court also cannot imagine how limiting a company's physical presence might be of value to it:
But the administrative costs of compliance, especially in the modern economy with its Internet technology, are largely unrelated to whether a company happens to have a physical presence in a State. For example, a business with one salesperson in each State must collect sales taxes in every jurisdiction in which goods are delivered; but a business with 500 salespersons in one central location and a website accessible in every State need not collect sales taxes on otherwise identical nationwide sales. [p. 12]
Worse, to the extent that the Court can imagine why a 500-person company might choose not to have boots on the ground in every state where it might happen to have an online customer, it is inexplicably hostile:
In effect, Quill has come to serve as a judicially created tax shelter for businesses that decide to limit their physical presence and still sell their goods and services to a State’s consumers—something that has become easier and more prevalent as technology has advanced. [p. 13]
Later it in the decision the Court further describes Quill as allowing out-of-state companies to aid and abet customers in "evad[ing] a lawful tax that unfairly shifts to those consumers who buy from their competitors with a physical presence that satisfies Quill—even one warehouse or one salesperson—an increased share of the taxes." [p. 17]
What is concerning is that in using these pejorative assessments the Court is essentially declaring, "How dare you do something legal to avoid liability." Which is sadly an admonition we've heard the Court make before in trying to substantiate a questionable holding in another case: Aereo.
As the Court continues, the comparison with Aereo becomes even more apt:
"Distortions caused by the desire of businesses to avoid tax collection mean that the market may currently lack storefronts, distribution points, and employment centers that otherwise would be efficient or desirable." [p. 13]
In other words, the Court has concluded, "Our jurisdictional rule is deterring investment in the state, so therefore it's a bad rule."
This sort of contorted reasoning is exactly what happened in Aereo, where the Court looked at who was making money, unilaterally decided it was the wrong people, and then tied itself in knots to write new law, indifferent to how much settled precedent it displaced or the full extent of its likely effects, in order to justify reallocating the financial gains.
Then, as now, it was a decision predicated on a series of questionable assumptions. We can only hope that this latest result won't be as seriously catastrophic for online innovation as Aereo has been.
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Filed Under: sales tax, scotus, south dakota, supreme court, taxes
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While following the regulations of one jurisdiction is simple, when that becomes thousands, and several may be relevant to a single sale, only large corporations will be the only ones that can do business on the Internet.
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They will have to know every state, county, city, suburb addon tax & do it perfectly everytime....
Or they can start refusing to service people in South Dakota, Australia pissed off Amazon & Amazon walked away from the country.
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Collecting the tax on what they sell is one problem, doing so for other vendors where they do not control the product infomation is a much more complex problem.
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There are 45 states with sales and use tax. For most of those states, individual counties and cities within those counties may add additional sales tax on top of the state (or county) rate.
And states define goods differently, or have different exemptions (e.g., prepared foods are often taxed while unprepared foods are not taxed).
The result is that there are over 10,000 sales tax jurisdictions in the United States.
Not that this case limits its effect to United States businesses. Technically anyone selling anything from anywhere that is shipped into a state would have to worry about this ruling and the 10,000 tax jurisdictions mentioned above.
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For example, say a supplier of a unique must have device for some very limited demand specific need is located in Japan, Canada or the EU.
Now that supplier would be responsible for taxes from all 10,000 tax jurisdictions plus the import tax.
It may easier and cheaper to simply not sell the device than pay the administrative cost associated with ascertaining which jusdrictions's taxes apply and the logistic of paying the taxes.
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Re: JURISDICTION
No level of American government has ANY legal authority to impose laws or taxes on persons/businesses outside its formal geographic boundaries (jurisdiction).
Also, taxing out-of-state businesses is Taxation-Without-Representation. Those out-of-state businessmen cannot vote in South Dakota, nor do they directly benefit from South Dakota government spending.
Despite popular belief, sales taxes are actually paid by the seller, not the buyer.
Commerce Clause in US Constitution was specifically intended to prevent just this type of impediment to interstate commerce -- harmful taxes/tariffs on goods imported from other states.
This was a horrible Supreme Court decision that will take decades to repair, while causing massive turmoil. It was a close split decision, but the Supremes majority obviously wanted to warn/threaten the serfs that the taxing power of American government is absolute.
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I maintain some business software for a client in Arkansas. Just in this state there are the state, 75 counties, and several dozen cities as "tax-collecting authorities", each one which has to be separately considered when figuring sales tax...
For extra fun, note that just because someone might have an *address* in Hooterville, doesn't mean they're actually *in* Hooterville's city limits. In a number of cases, they're not even in the same county. And then there are the towns that spread across county lines, and of course Texarkana, which sprawls across the state line...
The state tax goomers normally go by ZIP code, which the USPS carefully explains is a delivery code, not a location designation... last time my client got audited, the tax goomers found dozens of "errors" in their tax database. The client didn't even call me; they just whipped out the printout I'd made for them and pointed out where the state was in error... every single time, my client's database was correct according to the DFA's regulations.
Now, add 49 more states, the territories, and the protectorates... what I figure will happen is, vendors will add as much "tax" as they figure they can get away with, remit as little as possible to the taxing authorities as possible, and pocket the difference as profit. The only losers are the customers, and it's not like they can do anything about it, right?
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Excellent point. I moved to where I am currently because it's just outside the city, and the local grocery store is too, so I don't pay sales tax on purchases there. Doesn't save a lot, but over the course of a year, it adds up. But if you went by my ADDRESS, you'd assume I'd have to pay sales tax. This will really be an issue with online purchases... and I do a lot of online purchases.
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I smell a business opportunity.
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Re: I smell a business opportunity.
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Re: I smell a business opportunity.
Every company with more than 1M in in annual purchases is probably considering moving their incorporation to a state with no sales tax. It would be really good to be in the registered agent business right now. Companies will soon be buying EVERYTHING, from pencils to concrete, to steel, online, so they can claim zero sales tax.
The FCC did this sort of thing with telecom tarriffs decades ago. Whole telecoms rose and fell by playing screw the next guy on the tarriff regs. Companies would find ways to coin shave the regs using new technologies, and then the FCC would rule. Then Sombody would have to scratch a million bucks off their income statement, while somebody else laughed. This was actually the driving economic impetus for the technical development of VOIP, BTW.
It is important to note what SCOTUS just created. They alacazamed an interstate tarriff system out of thin air.
A brief example: sales tax on toll road tokens (digital or otherwise) is now going up to 500% with rebates to in-state buyers. Yep. It is now a thousand bucks to drive through New Jersey (unless you're from there). So if your a trucking company, guess what? You better incorporate in NJ. Because if you don't your going to spend an extra 100k$ a year on sales tax. Much cheaper to pay the couple of grand in registered agent fees to state cronies every year.
Somewhere some clerk at SCOTUS is saying: "er wut?"
This is what happens when you anthropomorphize corporations, without have a solid understanding of how corporate finance actually works. What SCOTUS is saying when it says that Corporations speak, is saying that they are sooooo smart they can reasonably control the machinations of corporate avarice on a national scale to such an extent it doesn't do irreperable harm to the union. Of course CEO's don't talk about that, because when they do they laugh so hard they piss their pants.
If you give a business the ability to externalize an expense, it will. That is what CEO's DO for a living. So SCOTUS just created a multibillion dollar football, and flipped a coin in the middle of 50 rabid drooling state legislatures. God knows where this is going to end.
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Enforcement
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The court said that "A website may leave cookies saved to the customers’ hard drives, or customers may download the company’s app onto their phones."
So basically, every website has a 'physical presence' in every state.
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The states taxation department will have jurisdiction over just about everyone doing business in a state. Instead of making things easier or simpler or even just showing basic logic, the court has decided that mayhem is the preferred state of affairs.
So yes, if you fall under the statute in question, the taxman cometh. No lube for you
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Re: Enforcement
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Re: Enforcement
"Extradition". Look it up.
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(Canada, for example, has 10 provinces; Alberta has no sales tax; several of the others have a "harmonized" tax, where the federal (GST) tax and provincial tax cover the same goods, and charged at a single rate. IIRC, the feds refuse to collect provincial taxes except the harmonized ones. Plus, there are exemption amounts for personal imports - $400 each after 48 hours, $50 anytime; hence, frequent shopping trips to the US.)
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Fortunately, the US Constitution doesn't allow the charging of tariffs between states and that's what your example would immediately become.
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"Use tax"? (I'm imagining tax authorities having a little party when they come across a return with an amount declared. Has anyone here ever paid it?)
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Then, as now, it was a decision predicated on a series of questionable assumptions. We can only hope that this latest result won't be as seriously catastrophic for online innovation as Aereo has been.
People generally see what they look for, and hear what they listen for. The justices found what they wanted in this case.
Unfortunately they seem to have done their navel gazing from the inside - again. They make it very hard to take them seriously when decisions like this fail logic 101 and are pure sophistry from start to finish. Five 'conservative' judges seem to have done a good job in legislating from the bench. Something they claim is verboten and possibly unconstitutional, separation of powers and all that.
This can, and should have been dealt with by Congress, who in their infinite 'wisdom' decided that the status quo was fine with them. The Supremes ditching Quill, and their 'reasons' for doing so is the worst form of twisted logic I have seen from them in quite a while. I think that if they had turned in assignments in law school that followed this type of reasoning they would have flunked out. Seriously, a fucking cookie in your browser gives you a physical presence? I guess we should just be glad that they didn't claim that the internet tubes established a substantial nexus with the taxing State.
My real question is, is this resulting from stupidity, ignorance, mendacity or perfidy; or all of the above?
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Ginsburg is conservative? That's news to me.
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The majority decision actually agrees with you. South Dakota v. Wayfair holds that Quill Corp v. North Dakota effectively made the Supreme Court the organ of government that addressed the problem of collecting sale taxes on sales to state residents from out-of-state sellers. The decision in Quill made it so that no legislature in the US could require that out-of-state sellers collect sales taxes. In order to let legislatures decide the question, and not the Supreme Court, the Supreme Court has to overturn its earlier decision. South Dakota v. Wayfair does not mandate that out-of-state sellers collect taxes. It leaves it to the legislatures to decide whether or not out-of-state sellers must collect these taxes. Now the legislatures have to figure it out.
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Choosing not to change the rules was Congress weighing in.
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"However, the Court explicitly stated that Congress can overrule the decision through legislation. ... No bills have made it to law, however, because of the controversy surrounding this matter."(wikipedia)
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I look forward to every tv commerical sold product, QVC, HSN to have to start collecting taxes in every state that demands it. I expect to see them decide its easier to not service these states who demand those who get nothing in return from the services the state offers foot the bill. I wonder what the tax on paying for membership in AARP comes out too... those guys really enjoy sending letters to legislators reminding them that pissing off old folks is a bad idea.
Its too hard, just make those rich tech companies fix it for us... this is the solution to everything these days.
Of course, Congress could avoid this huge fustercluck by doing something smart. Create a single internet tax rate to be paid to states. Something low like 2-4%, its a dirty compromise but its dirty to demand companies pay states where they have no real physical nexus.
The real root of this problem is legislators who did popular things that ended up creating shortfalls in budgets. Now that things are falling apart & they need funding its not popular to make the citizens who benefit from it pay for it.
Everyone wants nice things.... as long as someone else foots the bill.
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Not that hard
Look, no one enjoys paying taxes, but that's what pays for vital public services like education. Give the states a break.
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That is no longer a few lines of code, but a major database component, with all the maintenance effort that that entails, along with the offices full of people to deal with keeping it up to date, and sorting out how an item should be taxed in every jurisdiction.
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Re: Not that hard .. if someone else does it.
It kind of is onerous. In Texas alone you have the state sales tax rate of 6.25%. Then you have cities and counties together can add an additional 2%. There are 254 counties and 961 cities. In the state alone that gives you 1,216 taxing jurisdictions. Since most of them are going to charge the max allowed you're collecting the full 8.25% which is easy, it's the disbursement that starts to be a royal pain in the ass.
It's easy for Amazon to do ... everyone else, not so much.
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But You Need Amazon Anyway
I am fairly meticulous about keeping proper records and paying state use tax, and wind up paying something under fifty dollars a year. I find that when I place an Amazon order, part of it is supplied from Amazon warehouses, and sales tax is collected on this. The other part of the order is "laid off" to third-party vendors, and sales tax may or may not be collected on that. In practice, a high proportion of the laid-off items seem to come from either Costco or Wal-Mart/Sam's Club, because they were temporarily of stock at Amazon. .Wal-Mart has "loci" practically everywhere. Costco operates in many states A small business does not have comparative advantage in getting manufactured goods from the manufacturer. A small business is good at getting used goods, just as a rat is efficient at foraging for small crumbs. However, used goods usually sell for low prices.
In light of the decision, Amazon will just have to collect sales tax on everything, as if it had been supplied from Amazon's own warehouses. Since Amazon has a considered policy of moving all possible merchandise into its own warehouses anyway, relying on robots to counter a third-party vendor's possibly lower labor costs, this will simply accentuate that tendency.
A reasonable sort of small businessman, say a used book-dealer, will have a feel for what he can sell locally, and what he can't. For the stuff which cannot be sold locally, he would log onto Amazon, enter the tittles, etc, and print off adhesive labels. Each book would get taped up in a plastic bag, and a label put on the outside, and a box containing twenty or fifty books would get shipped off to Amazon. With proper arrangements, the postage need not cost more than ten cents per book. Amazon would open the box, scan the label of each wrapped book, and stick it in a designated slot of one of Amazon's famous moving shelves.. Amazon would then be able to assemble "economic orders" of ten or twenty books for a given customer.
The decision is slightly flawed, from a technical standpoint. It merely observes that South Dakota does adhere to the Streamlined Sales Tax, and that it does have small-business exemptions, and does not explicitly say that these are required to collect sales tax from out of state. I doubt that this is an issue-- faced with actual money to be picked up, the state legislatures will probably conform-- exactly-- to the Supreme Court opinion, including adopting the Streamlined Sales Tax. Why give a federal judge a pretext to rule the state tax law unconstitutional?
The present case does not involve someone desperately trying to prop up old-fashioned bricks-and-mortar stores. South Dakota, rather than some other state, is in the case because it does not have an income tax. Income taxes are generally progressive. You pay a higher rate if you are rich. Sales taxes are generally regressive. They tend to cover limited ranges of items. Rich people tend to spend their money on things like out-of-state college tuition, which are not taxable. Amazon is not in the case, because Amazon stresses fast delivery, and needs to have a warehouse within a hundred miles or so of every customer.
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I also acknowledge the added burden to small business.
Then I see the opportunity for other small businesses to step in and fill the void, perhaps not turbotax other other players that can plug in create a tax program.
Then again I wonder, how do small businesses function if they don't have a CPA that should be knowledgeable on taxes?
At the end of the day, small business has been around before the internet and will be around long after they get taxed on products THEY WOULD NOT HAVE SOLD without the internet...
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What isn't right is that multinational corporations lobbied, paid for, or through a mixture of lawyers and lobbies wrote laws and regulations that screw over small business and you and me.
This isn't a problem to be solved on a local level. As suggested above, standardized tax for online purchase is just one way to view fairness. Perhaps a VAT tax to replace all sales tax? Ingenuity, creative thinking and replacing politicians and their corporate parties would go a long way.
Another way to gauge fairness is from the states or county or cities view that online tax rulings impacts their ability to keeps roads and bridges and parks and social systems and education facilities, et. functioning. Local government will have to hire and install new tax systems too.
Problem being those in power in the 1980's broke the tax codes and the same groups are still running the government only now in more key positions with more control.
It's not taxes that are the problem, it's those creating the tax rules have been rewarding themselves out of our collective pockets.
Yes Amazon isn't impacted much based on their scale. Yes smaller business and those creating startups don't have the same opportunity.
It's based on those creating the legislation to favor themselves and the groups that they support. This is the legacy of Margret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan and those that supported (Europeon term) Neo-Liberal economics and those same people are in charge of all three branches of government.
Don't like this, want to help small business and your own tax or financial concerns. VOTE!
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I don't need a CPA. I learned the laws of my state, and since my volume is low, I can easily fill out the paperwork to file and remit Sales taxes. It really only works because I can remit all my taxes to one authority here in CA.
In my day job I file Sales tax reports for a medium business. The CPA doesn't handle that job. I do. A CPA is overkill for such a day to day accounting task.
SMall businesses existed before the internet. In general they were only subject to 1 tax jurisdictions. Only subject to sales tax in the location of their place of business. Mail order businesses were big businesses, not small.
If I had to deal with 50 tax authorities representing 10,000 tax jurisdictions, it would be impossible in either job. Just keeping CA tax tables updated is next to impossible.
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Re: Not that hard
"In the age of computers, it is a few lines of extra code."
As others have pointed out, it's more than a "few" lines. And it has to be maintained every time a tax is passed or adjusted anywhere in the country. And what happens when it turns out that an address that says City X actually isn't in the county that City X is in the center of, because zip codes are so weird? Is the state going to graciously forgive the error? Or are they going to assess not only the tax but fines and interest?
Sure, you can buy software instead of coding it yourself, but again, what if that software is wrong? And what if it doesn't integrate with your inventory management software? And even in the best case it's an ongoing cost instead of a one-time purchase; you're pretty much renting this type of program instead of buying it, because of the constant need to maintain it.
And it's even worse when you consider the details of various states' taxes. Is yarn taxable? If you're shipping it to New Jersey, that depends on whether it's sweater yarn or art project yarn. What about deodorant? If you're shipping to Texas, that depends on whether it contains an antiperspirant. What about candy bars? If your customer in is Illinois, the Twix bar has a different tax rate than the Snickers bar. It's hard enough to have to keep track of idiosyncrasies in your own state's taxes; it's even harder if your business is in Delaware and you have to keep track of whether or not San Fransisco has decided to pass a sugar tax and whether or not there's currently a temporary injunction while the various court rule on whether it's legal.
And frankly, regardless of the burden that is or isn't present, it's up to Congress to pass a law allowing this if they so choose. As of yet, they have not so chosen. Stare decisis should prevent SCOTUS from overturning its previous decision when Congress has the power to overrule the decision at its whim anyway.
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It's not "weirdness", it's that ZIP codes are being abused for purposes they weren't designed for. They were designed to route mail. From a ZIP code, the USPS can accurately decide what post office to send it to. They can't tell you the recipient's tax rate, because that's not relevant to them (or wasn't... could South Dakota use this ruling to make Montana businesses collect sales taxes from cross-border shoppers?)
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Re: Not that hard
Amazon has more than "a few lines of code", and Canada only has 10 sales tax regions (no municipal/city sales taxes; VAT in Europe is similar, with about 30 regions).
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Re: Not that hard
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Re: Re: Not that hard
No, it's ten sales tax jurisdictions. I'm not counting services like rentals, which don't really affect online sellers (a hotel is in a fixed location; they don't have to know the tax rules of the whole country).
The territories and Alberta are all federal-GST-only (again excluding hotels etc.). The other 9 provinces are HST or GST+PST. HST and GST use very similar rules everywhere; the provinces with PST will likely each have their own crazy exceptions.
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Taxation without representation and fairness.
Wasn't the idea that taxation without representation was inherently unfair one of the reasons for the American revolution? So, in the interest of fairness, shouldn't the Supreme Court now also allow people in other states subject to South Dakota's taxes also vote in it's elections?
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Re: Taxation without representation and fairness.
The people being taxed are the buyers, the seller is only acting as a tax collector for the country,state,county and city. So the people being taxed are represented by those demanding the tax.
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Re: Re: Taxation without representation and fairness.
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Re: Tax is on Sellers
WRONG
Any retail sales tax is ultimately paid by the seller !!
A sales tax merely raises the 'total' price of the item being sold. If sellers could so easily raise their prices (...say the 7% sales tax equivalent) -- they would have done so already and pocketed that easy money themselves. BUT higher prices lower customer demand and sales volume is reduced.
Basic economic laws of Supply & Demand & Prices do not change just because the government is pocketing the money.
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Re: Re: Tax is on Sellers
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Re: Re: Re: Tax is on Sellers
But there are minor exceptions depending upon the price elasticity of the specific item sold.
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Re: Re: Re: Re: Tax is on Sellers
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Re: Re: Tax is on Sellers
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Re: Re: Tax is on Sellers
Taxes in the US are paid by the customer, held by the retailer, and submitted by the retailer. Use tax was created in many states in order to insure they still got their cut from out-of-state purchases by their citizens, though it relied upon the honor system (and still does). Use tax is proof the tax is on the purchaser and not the business. Businesses being able to declare out-of-state sales as non-taxable income to their home State is proof that business do not pay sales tax, they simply remit it after collecting it from their customers.
So please stop saying the buyers are not the ones being taxed.
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Re: Tax is on Sellers
Nonsense
A 'sales tax' is imposed on the sales of goods or services. A legal sales tax can only be imposed in a state where the sale takes place (legal jurisdiction), which is typically where the seller is.
But to impose a 'tax on sales' that take place outside the 'buyer's' state, sneaky politicians invented the "use tax"... which {incredibly} taxes the 'use of goods or services' not otherwise subject to a sales tax in their state.
If an in-state state business or resident buys goods or services from an out-of-state seller the tax that is imposed is technically a 'use tax'.
States, motivated by the courts, have gotten together and agreed to exempt goods (and some services) that are exported from the seller's state from sales taxes, in order that the buyer's state may impose its own use tax.
The terms sales tax and use tax are technically different, but often erroneously used interchangeably.
Use-Taxes are often defended as legitimate 'consumption taxes', but they were enacted primarily to protect in-state vendors/sellers from out-of state competition. Secondarily, greedy state politicians wanted a cut of every sales transaction... no matter what the circumstances.
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Re: Taxation without representation and fairness.
Yeah, but they didn't write that into the law, did they? The court shouldn't be making up things that don't exist in law (which is what Cathy's post was about).
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Amazon already has their workaround...
Individuals selling, even with Amazon fulfillment, are individuals selling.
No tax collection.
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Sauce for the gander
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Re: Sauce for the gander
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Re: Re: Sauce for the gander
Customers will NOT automatically pay whatever price the seller sets.
Politicians can NOT casually impose sales taxes without significant negative effects on the markets taxed.
And it is fundamentally unjust to force private business people to be unpaid tax-collectors for the government -- it is essentially a hidden tax on business.
The internet tax not forces businesses to deal with thousands of tax districts at different tax rates -- but these districts also have differing complex rules on WHAT they tax, and even differing tax rates within the same district, depending on type merchandise. Internet businesses must establish/maintain tax-accounts with thousands of government offices ... to send in those sales tax dollars (this is a huge and likely fatal burden on small online businesses)
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Sears Catalogue
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Re: Sears Catalogue
Who is the Supreme Court to disagree?
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Re: Re: Sears Catalogue
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Re: Sears Catalogue
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Jurisdiction
Taxing based on the location of the seller raises all sorts of concerns over venue shopping for the best rates, but it streamlines things. As posters have pointed out, the seller isn't getting any of the benefits of the taxes collected. If Quill or Amazon has a fire, North Dakota isn't going to send trucks to put it out.
I do know that this isn't how interstate commerce works. Just feels like it should work the opposite way.
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Unintended consequences
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So let's implement a rule with all those problems only moreso.
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Re:
Maybe this is just the start of new era -- South Dakota should certainly also be able to tax the incomes of residents in Ohio and all other states. Perhaps someday we'll see a Federal Income Tax on everybody across the nation?
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What about the payments?
Suppose I run an Internet business and I have 100 customers and they buy 1 product each. I now have to calculate the tax of 100 purchases AND then send a payment check to each city, state, county, and jurisdiction that the customer lives in?
And suppose each customer buys a $10 shirt and the tax rates range from 3% to 7%... so I'm now sending a payment check for 30 cents to 70 cents to the government agencies.
I'm sure little counties in the middle of nowhere would love to get extra income from Internet businesses, but does their staff have the ability to handle thousands of payment checks for 50 cents or 25 cents each? How much time will be spent by the government to process and acknowledge this many payments?
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Re: What about the payments?
Now try this for an Amazon-sized operation with no local presence? I'm certain the result will be utter chaos.
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Re: Re: What about the payments?
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NOT a federal case, actually
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Re: Yes a federal case, actually
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There is a solution..
And charge a federal tax..1 fixed rate.
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National Sales Tax
Its the only way to fix this problem, conveniently.
The only winner here is the Federal Government.
States will be back to square one and citizens will be paying more for everything in exchange for little, if any, benefit.
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Sales tax as an interstate export tax.
Next week, WV and PA create the "coal producers reserve tax", thousands in northern states expected to freeze to death this winter.
Clearly SCOTUS thought this one through...
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Out of state companies are required to collect payroll taxes
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