Quote:
Originally Posted by Dulin's Books
and there is the argument about where the sale is taking place.
is it taking place in the state where the company is located, where the customer is physically located or where the server that hosts the site is physically located?
it makes the most sense to me to have that be where the business is located. my business is in Oregon. We have no sales tax. Customers come to my store and dont get charged a sales tax. just as if they came to my physical store in a local mall.
If we change that and say the transaction takes place where the customer is physically then I, the small business owner with very little margin and nearly 0 profit, would have to know the tax law in every state AND country( and perhaps provinces or states in those) my customer's are from. that's too costly a burden. it would kill small business because only large businesses would be able to afford to keep track of it all.
if you want to change it to where the servers are located I will set up a server farm tomorrow and business's will flock to it because there is no sales tax here. Oregon will benefit from the increased revenue of my profit making  and states with sales taxes will lose revenue. that would be ok with me |
Also in the case of a customer from Oregon buying something from me in person here in CA, if they show me their drivers license I cannot legally charge them CA sales tax due to reciprocity for state sales tax laws. Or has that changed since I last checked into it, oh I guess about a decade back.
It is very complicated but it is time for Amazon to step up and make sure this gets handled. Then again to try and wade through the taxes paid for each district in a state it is insanely complicated. Some places here in California the sales tax is about 8% but in say downtown San Francisco the sales tax is over 10%. How is a company like Amazon to know what amount of tax to collect? With the penalties for not collecting the proper tax as draconian as they are don't blame Amazon for simply not wanting top put the business at risk by no longer allowing sales from affiliates in some areas.
States have an obligation to make it EASY to pay our taxes but have done anything but and it is illegal for the Fed to collect any sort of tax for individual states which is as it should be if you believe in the very important issue of state's rights. State's rights has already been smashed to almost nothing as it is and I don't care to see it made worse over this.
I am in the process of moving out of CA because of the mess it is due to all manner of reasons not the least of which is I am not going to pay taxes for the state to go bankrupt in the next 2-3 years. But if I make a mistake on taxes somewhere along the line CA will come take my home or anything else they want even if they made a mistake to begin with. So because of a soon to be formalized new contract with a client, my attorney has incorporated me in Delaware and I am moving to WA as well as Wyoming and will never look back at the state of my birth.
But Amazon is not in the wrong here. But neither are they lily white. What should have been done a decade back was to build a system when the numbers were manageable and the system could be refined over the years. Now it is going to cost 10x what it would have for the past decade or so. Oh, the consumer was not absent blame here as well. If you remember back a decade when this issue began to appear, everyone who had a keyboard and zero ability to reason was on a soapbox that they were completely against states daring to collect tax on these sales for things which otherwise would have been purchased in the state.
This issue will have some significant effects on all online commerce in the US as well as items purchased OUTSIDE the US as well. Because we are required to report and pay those taxes as well.