Posted on 08/16/2017 4:03:29 AM PDT by SMGFan
Amazon is doing great damage to tax paying retailers. Towns, cities and states throughout the U.S. are being hurt - many jobs being lost!
I believe Federal law would preclude a state from collecting a sales tax from a business located outside the state.
Sears could have easily been Amazon had there been a little bit of vision in the corporate offices. They were the Amazon of their day back at the turn of the last century. Sears screwed the pooch big time.
Every transaction I make on Amazon gets state and local sales taxes added. I don’t know what the President is talking about.
Then virtually every on-line retailer I deal with is breaking the law. They all collect sales taxes.
There may be something regarding that, but as far as forcing a business to collect sales tax within a state where it has a physical presence, no. Which is what the original poster referred to. That's purely a state matter.
Don't confuse state with retailer. A retailer, if it has a physical presence in your state, must collect relevant sales taxes on sales to you, on-line or otherwise.
If the retailer has no physical presence in your state, they are not obligated to collect sales tax, but they may opt to do so, and remit those taxes to your state. Under current law, the state cannot force an out-of-state retailer, with no physical presence in your state, to collect sales tax from you for on-line or mail-order purchases, but there is nothing that prevents the retailer from collecting and remitting those taxes.
Actually, that's not entirely true. There is a federal law that was put in place decades ago that mainly concerned businesses that offered catalogs. There was no sales tax on catalog sales if you had no physical presence in the state being shipped to. That has largely been transferred to the internet for obvious reasons.
Everyone is acting like this is all new, but really, it is not.
Interestingly, these laws don't distinguish between a "retail presence" and a "warehouse presence" ... so Amazon is forced to collect sales taxes in any state where they have a distribution center even if they have no other presence in the state at all.
I also pay California sales tax on Amazon purchases. That was effective several years ago.
I still buy heavily from Amazon despite not having a ax break.
I think their appeal goes far beyond the tax break. “
Same day, one or two day shipping” and a massive selection.
As a senior, my next step is food delivery which is getting difficult for me.
DITTO
I used to work for a state tax agency. I worked the fuels tax area, very black and white with rules.
The sales/use tax area would generally only attempt use tax audits on companies that were likely to buy via out-of-state supplier, and have that hard physical asset sitting in the business. It's pretty easy to track dentist chairs, medical equipment, things like that.
They never went after Joe Consumer.
What's funny is, the state had an automated system that allowed a taxpayer to voluntarily remit use taxes when they filed their taxes on-line. No one ever used it.
A tax agency employee actually found out the line had a coding glitch in it when he attempted to voluntarily pay use tax on items he'd ordered from out of state. The line basically blew up the tax return and would not allow further processing. It was an embarrassment.
You are correct. Enforcement would be difficult, at best.
The state would basically have to operate under the assumption that, unless the consumer was in business, that most items ordered from out of state would be taxable to the consumer.
It would be on the taxpayer to have records to prove he or she was not the final consumer. That gets into a real legal mess. Unless the state can force retailers to provide customer lists and purchases for taxpayers in that state, the state simply has no standing to go on a fishing expedition.
I don’t know, it’s a catch 22. Sure brick-n-mortar are hurting due to Amazon but Amazon isn’t forcing any clicks. It’s a matter of Amazon creating/finding/filling a need. I just bought my wife’s birthday present w/o expending time and fuel to go shopping - with all that entails. I now have both available for other purposes. Amazon has discovered a way to save time, something money can’t buy. While retail jobs are beginning the dwindle, currier /delivery driver jobs are on the rise. But I can’t stand Bezos and Amazon is a bastard to work with on the supplier level.
Fortunately, only a handful of consumers were affected. This coming from a former Sears employee
Amazon itself has always collected local sales tax (at least in my experience).
There are retailers under the Amazon platform that do not.
What the impact of that is remains unclear to me.
As I posted elsewhere, we are now supposed to hate Target, Walmart, Penneys and Amazon. I apparently can no longer by underwear.
Maybe not in your neck of the woods, but they sure did in my state about 25 years ago.
Sales tax receipts in New York were always a big issue for a number of reasons. A big one was that counties and cities have the authority to impose their own sales taxes on top of the state sales tax. The state sales tax rate for New York is only 4%, but when you add city and county rates on top of it New York City has one of the highest sales taxes in the country at 8.875%. New York City is within an hour's drive of three other states (New Jersey, Connecticut and Pennsylvania) with lower sales taxes, so they were always losing sales tax revenue when NYC residents would drive to other places and go shopping there.
In the early 1990s, it got so bad that the NYC government had a brilliant idea to send tax agents to drive around the parking lots of shopping malls in neighboring states. They'd record the New York license plates of cars parked there, then use the information to do audits and attempt to collect the "use tax" from these people.
Someone in the New Jersey governor's office got wind of this, and the state attorney general issued a public statement informing the NYC mayor's office that these out-of-state tax agents had no jurisdiction to operate in New Jersey. He also threatened to have the tax agents arrested for trespassing and charged as if they were sexual predators stalking potential victims. That put an end to the whole practice very quickly.
Amazon has been collecting and paying taxes already on goods sold in any state where it has a physical presence - which is most states, now. I pay sales tax on every Amazon transaction.
I honestly wish Trump would present a clear vision of what he wants the American economy to be. It seems to be the economy that my grandfather had in the 50s - a local manufacturing plant that employs half the male population and a downtown that sold the necessities.
Is this what we really want?
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Anyway, you make a good point about the messaging of President Trump. I know he made some nice announcements yesterday about infrastructure but it got lost in all the noise of the ginned up controversies - the mainstream media are bound and determined to get him off message and distract the people from the good things he is doing for us and our nation.
I think Trump needs to get in front of the nation with some Oval Office addresses in prime time and clearly state his agenda - asking the people to put pressure on their legislators to get his agenda through. I'm surprised he hasn't done this yet. The networks will be pretty much forced to cover him in this situation and he'll be able to get in front of all the people at once.
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