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US Senate Passes National Internet Sales Tax Mandate
SonicSpike writes with the news that the U.S. Senate yesterday "passed a nonbinding proposal to allow states to collect sales tax on Internet sellers that have no presence within their borders. The proposal was an amendment to a 2014 budget bill that the Senate debated Friday. It was pushed by Senators Mike Enzi, a Wyoming Republican, and Dick Durbin, an Illinois Democrat, and was designed to give backers a sense of whether they had enough votes to push forward with final legislation to impose an Internet sales tax. The vote showed they have plenty of backing to overcome any filibuster seeking to block a final sales tax bill."
Dealing with all the localities is a paperwork and regulatory nightmare. They should not be making the states be able to do remote sales. If they want the money they should simply have a federal sales tax and then the government can divvy the money up to the states just like they do with so many other funding things. Instead they are creating more of a burden for small businesses. Once again, Big Corp has the advantage since they have the systems in place for this and can spread the overhead over many products. Big Gov loves Big Corp.
You're not considering the other issues such as having to go through multiple state audits when they want to challenge if you're sending them enough of the revenue that you're collecting for them. Finding out that oops, this country in this state raised their tax rate and you didn't know but now they're taking you to court for not paying the right fees is not how you want to run a business.
In the end, the big chains that can afford it (Amazon) will have distribution centers in each state and completely dodge the issue, while all the added burden will go to their smaller competitors.
It would seem to me that whatever solution Congress adopts there will be a variety of services made available for these sorts of businesses. Hopefully there will also be a threshold below say some million dollars per year where this sort of stuff isn't required. Of course given the stupidity of Congress one can't count on this being part of the legislation.
I don't have to file tax returns myself; I just buy a copy a tax software package once a year, put in my financial info and shazzam! the returns are uploaded. Shouldn't be a big deal to actually pay the tax.
The real onerous part of this process would be where states start wanting an audit. Now THAT would have serious potential to destroy a small business.
Use a tax service. They tell you what the tax rates are, and some of them deal with the liability issue. If you didn't collect taxes correctly because of their data, they'll cover it. It's insane, actually. Taxes change on an almost daily basis somewhere in the U.S. Between legitimate tax rate changes at any level from city, county, to state, to tax holidays, etc. nobody can keep track of this shit unless they're in the business of keeping track of it... which is why tax services are so helpful. My customers all use them. When your core business is selling widgets, you can't keep track of thousands of tax jurisdictions.
24 beers in a case, 24 hours in a day. Coincidence? I think not!
I do not see use taxes as legitimate. They are an end run around the Interstate Commerce Clause.