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Originally Posted by J. Strnad
I really think that internet sales have outgrown the "states" model and become something the Fed has to deal with.
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I think this is probably right.
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I wonder about all of the additional sales taxes from cities and counties. Should/does Amazon have to collect those? We're talking about literally thousands of such sales taxes, and they change with every election and some expire after a set time. How could a company that sells nationally be expected, reasonably, to keep up with all of those taxes?
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I think the difficulty of collecting these taxes is overstated - online retailers with a presence in every state (Walmart.com, apple.com, bn.com) have been able to do this for years with no difficulty. I understand that the general approach is to subscribe to a service that keeps track of sales taxes by address for every state. Which is not as hard as it sounds if you are appopriately staffed - every state has one agency that does the same thing for that particular state...so even if the state consists of a patchwork of jurisdictions, you can find this all out by just going to one place in each state.