It’s not that much of a nightmare. Back in the pre-internet mail order days the rules were simple and followed by most companies: if they had a physical presence in the state they had to pay sales tax there for orders that stayed within the state, which meant they charged customers who lived in those states sales tax. If you remember old mail order forms they always had these lines in the math part of the form that said stuff like “residents of FL, AZ and OH add 5% sales tax”.
For whatever reason when internet retail started up everybody pretended that they weren’t mail order and didn’t have to follow the same rules as the Sears Catalog. The fact is they are mail order and have to follow the same rules, and since they could manage to pull it off in the pre-computer days I’m betting it won’t be that hard in the computer days. Really all you need to do is know what states you have a physical presence in, know their sales tax, and if the billing address of the orderer is in one of those states apply the sales tax. It’s like 1 SQL table and 1 query.
As for resellers, if Amazon is smart they have in the terms of service that the business has to handle their own legal stuff. But they need to follow the sames rules, if your business running through Amazon has a physical presence in a state and the orderer is also in that state you need to pay the sales tax. You don’t have to pass the bill on to the customer, but you still gotta pay.
And of course eliminate the Income Tax.....
I can dream......................
Not so easy, as I said, with different counties having different sales tax, within the same state. Here’s Florida’s 67 counties and you’ll see, not a uniform sales tax. We do collect to things sold within our state, just saying if we have 49 other states with similar variations in sales tax to FL, then it’s going to get “very interesting.”
http://miami.about.com/od/governmentcityservices/a/salestax.htm