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From NewsMax:
Amazon will start collecting state sales taxes nationwide starting April 1 after those governments complained for years about losing revenue to the Internet retail giant.
The move adds Hawaii, Idaho, Maine, and New Mexico to the states where Amazon will collect state sales taxes, after other states were added earlier this year, CNBC noted. Amazon will not collect state sales taxes in Alaska, Delaware, Oregon, Montana, and New Hampshire because they don't have sales tax levies.
The National Conference of State Legislatures said its members lost $23.3 billion in revenue in 2012 due to their inability to collect sales taxes from online purchases, CNBC noted. Amazon, the biggest e-commerce business, will collect state sales taxes for all entities that have them.
[...] Money magazine wrote this week that New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo is calling for internet retailers like eBay, Etsy, and similar online marketplaces to be made to collect state and local sales tax. Proposals are in the works for New Mexico and Rhode Island.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday April 01 2017, @06:08AM (1 child)
The transaction spans state borders, and so the tax should be spread across borders as well. Federal law should make you pay half the tax where you live, and half the tax where stuff ships from. So if you are in an 8% state and stuff ships from a 6% state, then 4% goes to your state and 3% goes to the other state.
Pure data probably ought to be exempt. It doesn't physically ship from anywhere, and it never really arrives.
For states that make things super-painful, federal law should say that the lowest rate wins. For example, consider Florida. There is a 6% state tax, but counties can add on another 2% if they wish. That is too damn complicated, so it should be 6%. There are also crazy exemptions... when those get out of hand, the federal government should specify that the lowest rate may be used. This is an incentive to not be crazy; imagine the nightmare for a supermarket. The supermarket stocks hot food, alcoholic beverages, paper, basic staples like raw whole fresh potatoes, and batteries. Oh, the state waives the sales tax on "hurricane supplies" like batteries for a month before hurricane season, and on "school supplies" for a month before school starts. No, just no, no sales tax for you!
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday April 01 2017, @01:39PM
You have made it too hard. The carrier is the owner of goods while in transit. So the carrier is the one that has in state presents (delivery), so they collect the tax - at the point of consumption your home. Accurate every time, and a few companies for the state to audit.
For your method, the simplist method is call Value Added Tax (VAT). The person adding value will pay tax for raw goods and collect for finish goods, then pay different / collect lost from the their tax authority. So you buy goods at $100 with $10 built in tax. Then do something including holding it for 2 months and seller it $150 with $20 built in tax. You will pay authority $10 ($20 - $10). This is the major tax method across the world, so the software is up and working for decades. Example: buy wood, turn them round, sell baseball bats. You have transformed the goods (adding value) so you collect more tax than you paid.
VAT does/did have interesting side issues: A glass of milk in Vienna:
If you pour it over your oatmeal for breakfast - is a food so taxed at 10%
If you drink it with your oatmeal - is a beverage so taxed at 15%
If you are sitting in the bar vs the restaurant (one chair away) - is a bar drink so taxed at 30%
All taxing authorities have these issues. :) Bring new meaning to edge cases.
I did a system that if the tax was NOT readily available. Say county-city pair was not found, like spelling issue "De Kalb" vs "DeKalb", then system will take the tax rate found for all cities w/ best matches (prefect 1-to-1, first few letter matches, city found & county not, ... ) in the area and determine an average rate. Same would go for state issues.
We were audited by multiple states every year. The agents thanked us for being the most accurate tax collections 2 to 3 decimal points than better then allow (ie: +/= 5% error, we were +/- 0.05%. Also identified errors in the table, so that could be corrected.. At that time we had had over 160k tax rates by city-county pairs. We bought those rates from an accounting firm that collects them from all special districts, cities, counties, states and fed Data entry mistakes were common.
One example is Hawaii is has no sales tax. But does have an excise tax (4%) that can based on to the comsure as a "sales tax". But the 4% is added to NET nor calcite on the gross. SO you actually have to gross up the amount and use and adjusted percentage of 1 - ( 100 / (100 - 4)) ` 4.166%, then calculate the 4% on that. BUT NOTE: Do not round up! That is illegal in Hawaii. 4.166% is good. 4.167% is bad.