Quote:
Originally Posted by HarryT
Surely you have to pay use tax on your purchases if you consume them in your own state, don't you?
|
That's generally true. One problem is that most people aren't aware of the obligation to pay, and the mechanism for paying involves keeping track of all your purchases, adding them up, multiplying them by an obscure percentage (the base sales tax rather than the local one,) and submitting the form to the twelfth bureaucrat on the left on a Tuesday in November. In other words, the government assumes that not only will people pay, but that they will do an excessive amount of paperwork to do so, even though the liklihood of getting caught is practically non-existent.
In Illinois, where I live, it dawned on some bright fellow that maybe the state should make it simple. So they devised a nice simple form where you pay a flat amount based on your net income, filed along with your income tax return. (It's still a separate form, which is dumb, but better than what it used to be.) This new process will be generally ignored, but anyone who makes significant internet purchases should be smart enough to recognize that using the new form lets you understate your actual liability.