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States Can Require Internet Tax Collection, Supreme Court Rules

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Re: States Can Require Internet Tax Collection, Supreme Court Rules

#21
post #14

Fascinating mix of justices on this one: > The vote was 5 to 4. Justice Anthony M. Kennedy wrote the majority opinion and was joined by Justices Clarence Thomas, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Samuel A. Alito Jr. and Neil M. Gorsuch. I can't imagine we're gonna see RBG agreeing with the Alito/Gorsuch/Thomas clan too often.

If there's one thing that career DC-ites can agree on, it's that citizens and (most) corporations need to pay their pound of flesh to the government.

Re: States Can Require Internet Tax Collection, Supreme Court Rules

#22
Software engineers and entrepreneurs are extremely clever, numerous solutions will arise to integrate with all of the major ecommerce platforms to automate this. This won't be much of a burden on business. As long as regulations are clearly defined (unlike GDPR) the industry will deal. Uncertainty is always the biggest risk.

Re: States Can Require Internet Tax Collection, Supreme Court Rules

#23

Someone needs to develop a service to make calculating and paying the sales tax easier. Something like plugin an address and it spits out the tax percentage and where to remit the payment to. Ideally the states would get together and create a centralized service so companies don't have to be mailing checks to every single county government that has a sales tax.

[deleted]

Re: States Can Require Internet Tax Collection, Supreme Court Rules

#24
post #10
post #3

I find it hard to argue with from a fairness perspective. Clearly, retail is in a much different place from when Quill was decided. My concern is more in how a mom & pop online shop operating independently complies as a practical matter, which means not only collecting the right amount for different types of items but presumably remitting and filing with a huge number of different tax jurisdictions.

In Colorado you're already asked when filing state taxes what the value of the goods you bought online that haven't been taxed yet, so the onus is on the filer to look up receipts from the year for tax purposes. Amazon already collects tax in Colorado, but a few smaller retailers will send you a letter at the end of the year totaling up your untaxed purchases. Since different counties and localities collect different…

>In Colorado you're already asked when filing state taxes what the value of the goods you bought online that haven't been taxed yet

Many states do this. I imagine that relatively few individuals (as opposed to businesses) actually comply.

Re: States Can Require Internet Tax Collection, Supreme Court Rules

#25

Someone needs to develop a service to make calculating and paying the sales tax easier. Something like plugin an address and it spits out the tax percentage and where to remit the payment to. Ideally the states would get together and create a centralized service so companies don't have to be mailing checks to every single county government that has a sales tax.

A number of these exist. Where I used to work we used Avalara.

Re: States Can Require Internet Tax Collection, Supreme Court Rules

#26

I have a hunch that this will, in the end, be a massive win for large retailers vs. small ones. The task of figuring out how to calculate tax for all states is more or less the same amount of work regardless of size, which means for someone like Amazon it's more or less trivial, but for a mom-and-pop store it's a major hassle.

Payment processing services will most likely provide a solution to do this automatically. Charging credit cards is already pretty complicated, and they abstract it away already, so it would make sense for them to provide this as an additional service.

Re: States Can Require Internet Tax Collection, Supreme Court Rules

#27
post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We’ve been looking at tech solutions for calculation / remittance. So far only found Avalara. I’d be surprised if PayPal, Stripe, and others won’t step into this now that it’ll be fairly profitable.

Stripe already recommends Avalara and a couple others: https://stripe.com/docs/orders/tax-integration

That seems to only address calculating the tax however. Presumably the business is still expected to remit the tax collected to each tax jurisdiction as required plus whatever necessary paperwork.

Re: States Can Require Internet Tax Collection, Supreme Court Rules

#28
This is great news for Amazon. They already collect sales tax on everything they sell in most states (47 I think?). Now that smaller sellers (marketplace sellers, eBay, etc.) also have to collect tax, that hurts the ~8% discount built in, so why even shop around?

Re: States Can Require Internet Tax Collection, Supreme Court Rules

#30

Someone needs to develop a service to make calculating and paying the sales tax easier. Something like plugin an address and it spits out the tax percentage and where to remit the payment to. Ideally the states would get together and create a centralized service so companies don't have to be mailing checks to every single county government that has a sales tax.

I'm pretty sure that product exists. I've heard of AvaTax; there may be others.

I typed "avatax vs" in Google and it autocompleted "taxjar", so there's another I guess.

Yes it would be nice if the states made it easier.

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