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Court: Borders Web Ops Must Remit CA Sales Taxes
ScentCone writes "A rather quiet appellate court ruling finds that Borders must start coughing up sales taxes to California. Even though Borders spun off their online business to a separate company (now run by Amazon), has no employees, physical facilities, banking, or other activity in the state, the court found for California. While this is at first alarming (unless you write e-commerce software, in which case this may be the Programmer Permanent Employment Act), the court's reasoning was that despite the separate structures, the Borders brick-and-morter presence in CA, some overlapping board membership, common logos, cross-promotion, etc., meant that the two divisions were too entangled to fend off CA's army of hungry revenuers. Ramifications could include good old print catalog operators, store-less biggies like Amazon that have partnerships with CA companies, and more."
Which state would charge and receive the sales taxes? Which state does the sale take place in?
These are the reasons there were no sales taxes on out of state mail orders. I guess you want both states to charge sales taxes. If that happens, then people living in states with no sales taxes would order from companies that reside in states with no sales taxes, and the number of internet sales would drop to somthing close to zero.
Just my $0.02 worth.
Simple and clean solution: Implement a flat tax for all online purchases for all states (yes, even NH and the other tax-free states). Send the tax to each state based on the ship-to zipcode.
Results: Each state gets a piece of the action and the online stores can't complain about the costs to implement all of the different tax codes all over the nation.
And that's a misunderstanding of the nature of sales tax.
The tax is on the transaction. Neither party is the one who must pay it legally. By convention the retail customer pays it. However, some stores do have "we pay your sales tax" sales from time to time.
You will see states try to collect sales taxes on things like farm trades of good for goods. No dollars are involved, but you are still expected to pay the sales tax based on a fair market rate for the exchanged goods. In this example it's much more obvious that neither party is of an advantaged position, as Einstein might say, than when the trade is goods for dollars. It's all stuff for stuff, from the state's point of view.
Having said that, I'm sure there are some states with mentally challenged politicians who do not realize this, and try to word things such that the store paying the tax (instead of the customer) amounted to giving the customer money, and hence was income to the customer, and hence the custo...
God damn it I hate politicians! DIE LIKE PIGS IN HELL!
No, seriously. I wanna hear your fat cracklin' as it lies on the relatively dense lava, which you won't sink into, unlike the movies.
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
So those stupid "we pay the sales tax" sales are illegal in Iowa? I have to wonder how hard this screws over concessions vendors, which almost universally charge a fixed price including tax rather than line-iteming the tax.
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
As far as I can tell. Of course, if you do any looking into Iowa sales tax rules, there's an awful lot of grey areas - presumably there so that the department of revenue has something to do.
I can't speak for concessions vendors, but food is generally excluded from sales tax. I think restaurants charge sales tax on food that they prepare, but I'm not sure if a concession stand falls within that?
A fine is a tax you pay for doing wrong and a tax is a fine you pay for doing all right.
You are "magically exempt" from a foreign state's vehicle registration fees as well.
Depends on the state and what you are doing there with an out of state vehicle. There are some states that firmly believe that if you bring an out of state vehicle within their jurisdiction with the intent to work, even for one day before you go back to your home state, you must register the vehicle, otherwise you are in violation of the law. A few years back, Montana used to aggresively enforce this.
On how to dodge paying sales tax...I recommend eveyone in the country cultivate a friend in Wyoming which has no sales tax. Have your stuff shipped there...no tax is collected...your friend ships the stuff to you.
1) "Act" can be short for "action."
1a. Yeah, so? It's short for "action" even when it refers to a law.
1b. The original poster clearly meant it to refer to a law. You may have caught the "the" preceding it as well as the capitalization of the name of the law.
1c. The original poster had a sense of humor, whereas clearly you do not.
2) It was a humorous metaphor. No one is implying that the judges actually passed legislation of any sort.
2a. Duh.
2) [continued] Quoth the summary, "...unless you write e-commerce software, in which case this may be the Programmer Permanent Employment Act[.]" I don't know how you could read that to mean a literal act, which is what your joke would need to be witty
2b. Sorry, friend. It does not have to respond to anything literal to be witty. You're wrong. In fact, my joke's wittiness has already been certified 100% Witty by the Wittiness Board in full compliance with the Witty Post-Reply Act of 2005.