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Calling B.S. On Amazon's Taxation Arguments
theodp writes "Over at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, Michael Mazerov carefully picks apart Amazon's arguments against collecting sales taxes, arguing that they simply do not withstand scrutiny. While Amazon officials say collecting sales tax in every state would be excessively burdensome, Mazerov notes the e-tailer already collects sales tax in virtually every state for numerous other companies that sell on its website. Mazerov also finds it disingenuous for Amazon to argue that it should not have to help support public services in states in which it has no physical presence when the company fails to support public services in most of the states in which it does have a physical presence. Finally, Mazerov isn't buying Amazon's argument that its opposition to collecting sales tax is not driven by a desire to gain a price advantage over competitors, which he finds at odds with the company's own actions and SEC filings. By claiming sales-tax immunity, says Mazerov, Amazon has enjoyed an unfair 5%-10% price advantage over local retailers, while also depriving states and localities of hundreds of millions of dollars of legally due revenue each year."
It is unrealistic for every company to figure out what sales tax applies in every state, that is why there is a company that does it for you: Vertex. I recently worked on a project to implement this software for a large retailer. Amazon has far more technical knowledge than the average bricks and mortar retailer, this is no reasonable excuse as to why they cannot pay local sales tax. It is long past time for the online retailers to start paying sales tax just like every other business.
Not having to pay sales tax is one of my primary reasons that I often buy products online. Online retailers already have a lot of advantages for many types of products, there is no reason that they should be subsidized over local retailers.
I call BS anyway. There are only 50, is it too much to have some schmoe simply look the damned tax up on a sheet of paper? WTF?
If only it were so simple. The US sales tax system is a byzantine mess. You have state taxes, city taxes, transit authority taxes, public improvement fees, etc which apply based on where the sale occurred. That is the easy piece though. The difficult part is that the tax rates themselves can be different based off the products. Some products are taxable in one state but not in others. A simple example is plain bottled water which is pretty much untaxed everywhere, and flavored bottled water which is taxable in most states. Then you have tax free holidays where a certain class of products are tax free for 3 days (typically back to school), but it is a different set of days for different areas of the country of course.
To top all that off, cities, states, etc are constantly changing the rules as to which products are taxable and which are not. It is a real pain in the a** to deal with, but all of the national retail chains have to deal with it, so why can't Amazon and the other online retail companies? The best case would be to just have a national sales tax that is the same everywhere instead of the current stupid system. Instead of forcing companies to devote millions of person hours to figuring out what taxes to pay, people could actually be doing something productive.
Ahem.
The IRS has *nothing* to do with Use Taxes. That's your local Member State that collects use tax, not the central government.
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Try 100K. We get a monthly update of 100K records.
Infuriate left and right