Quote:
Originally Posted by Liviu_5
That's true but nobody does it and most people do not know that it's required, though some states started to put a special line on the tax-form to ask specifically about that. Since it cannot be enforced (as opposed to RIAA, the state politicians need to be reelected after all, so they cannot target 100 people out of millions at random  ), the "remedy" is to pass a "uniformization" rule that would impose on the vendor the requirement to collect the tax irrespective of location, the way physical retailers do it.
Until now, the big online only retailers that do not charge tax so benefit immensely (Ebay, Amazon) fought successfully the uniformization rule, while Wal Mart, Target, B&N and others that have nexus everywhere started fighting hard for the tax to "level the playing field" |
I agree with you that paying sales tax regardless of where you buy from would be the sensible option, but I'm a bit puzzled about why use tax can't be enforced. Why can't the IRS (or whoever it is that's responsible for it) simply take a random sampling of sales records from retailers and check to see if the customer has declared the amount for use tax? That's the way that the authorities do VAT checks here.
Surely a massive amount of tax evasion is going on if what you say is true (and I'm certainly not doubting you!). I'm amazed that the government is willing to let that much revenue go uncollected!
It used to be the case that online sales didn't have to charge VAT here, but the EU closed that "loophole" some years ago. If a company is now registered any in the EU (as, for example, eBay and Amazon are), they have to charge customers VAT for any online transaction.