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Amazon To Collect Indiana Sales Tax In 2014
An anonymous reader writes with this quote from an Associated Press report:
"Amazon.com will begin collecting Indiana's 7 percent sales tax from customers in the state in 2014, under an agreement announced Monday. ... Gov. Mitch Daniels' office said Indiana will become the fourth state with such a tax collection agreement with Seattle-based Amazon. It follows a lawsuit by Indianapolis-based shopping mall owner Simon Property Group against the state over the issue and a lobbying push on state legislators by traditional retailers to end what they call an unfair price advantage for online retailers. The deal doesn’t include any other companies, but Daniels said the state is asking Congress to require all online businesses to collect state sales taxes."
The first objection, that a taxing area may span multiple zip codes, is no objection at all. Knowledge of customer zip code would still tell you all you need to know about how much to tax a customer.
The second objection, that one zip code may cover multiple taxing areas, is more serious. However, I tend to doubt that there is any example of it. Can you cite one? It just wouldn't make sense, since it would basically make all mail order impossible to conduct.
In any case, as you point out, every individual small business cannot be expected to have access to the tax code for every tax code for the country. I don't think they would have to. A business or businesses would spring up to take care of this for them. A subscription web site, where you just enter a zip code and a product price and category, and it will spit out the tax for you, and in fact take your tax payment information on the spot and arrange tax payments from your account to all the appropriate jurisdictions at the prescribed intervals. I don't want to minimize the complexity, but a subscription service can certainly handle this with minimum hassle to the subscribing businesses.