Posted on 09/04/2013 6:24:46 AM PDT by Perdogg
Gov. Bob McDonnell's administration has reached a deal withAmazon.com Inc. for the giant online retailer to start collecting sales taxes in Virginia.
The agreement calls for Amazon to start collecting the taxes of purchases made by Virginians on Sept. 1, 2013.
(Excerpt) Read more at articles.wdbj7.com ...
This just means more sales from websites other than amazon.
the trade deficit will just get worse.
what next sales tax on 3d printed objects?
Thanks, I included GA on the topics list.
I report it because I am the type that would get caught if I did not.
Barnes and Nobel and Underarmour collects taxes on their sites. I believe all of the department stores do as well.
Virginia... a once great AMERICAN state.
LLS
Gotta love soft conservatives like Bob. The problem I have with the idea is it is wrong headed. If I go to FL and buy a refrigerator I’m not required to pay VA state taxes on it even if I bring it back into the state. I will have course paid FL taxes on it. The only justification for state taxes applied to the internet is that taxes be collected in the state where the online vendor operates its business which I find reasonable though of course that model would cause internet retailers to base operations in low state tax states which I believe would be good. States would then compete for online retailer business. That of course is not what is wanted. The powers at be instead want to be able to force an online business in VA to collect taxes not just for the state it operates in but for potentially all 50 states which of course will have the affect of forcing the smaller businesses out of business while Amazon grows and grows.
Here is an example:
http://www.revenue.wi.gov/faqs/ise/usetax.html#use2
These types of things aren’t enforced usually because of obvious reasons which is why they are targeting big online retailers which of course is why big online retailers are lobbying Congress with big $ so the circle of corruption remains unbroken.
Interestingly enough there are 5 states without use taxes.
Alaska, Delaware, Montana, New Hampshire, and Oregon
http://www.forbes.com/sites/robertwood/2012/11/24/you-can-still-escape-sales-tax-online/
they have in state stores.
the solution is to buy the same stuff out of country or state.
these are “I got mine” legislation/taxes
Why? Now you have to keep track of that purchase, and do the “use tax” on your Virginia state income tax. That’s harder than having Amazon collect it.
Otherwise, you can’t sign your income tax form where it says you have truthfully filled in all the information. Because if you do say you filled it in, and you put “0 dollars” for your use tax amount, you will be committing perjury, and since you just confessed to the purchase publicly, it will be hard for you to argue that you didn’t buy it.
Sadly, the state sales tax will still increase, unless they change the law or congress passes the sales tax collection act.
I think that with Amazon collecting the sales tax, that should be sufficient for the state to rescind the tax increase they voted on to cover the loss of tax revenue from tax cheaters.
If you buy things in Maryland, you are paying Maryland sales tax. Since Maryland sales tax is higher than Virginia, you should not have to report any purchases from Maryland.
You only have to report purchases if the sales tax is either not collected, or is less than the Virginia tax, and you bring the items you purchased back into Virginia.
Technically you are required to. But nobody does (I never have and never will). The entities out there most likely to self report those things are generally parts of the government, like schools. Kind of ironic when you think about it.
Geithner had no idea he was cheating on his taxes either — apparently some accountants aren’t very good.
It’s not even obscure. I use H&R block taxcut program and it asks me about the entry.
Every year I keep a spreadsheet of all my online purchases and whether I paid sales tax or not. I keep food separate because food is taxed at a lower rate in Virginia. I track things that I buy that are gifts for people living in other states, because if you buy something online for use in another state the spirit of the law says it is not taxable (I say “spirit of the law” because there is some question about whether an item that ends up in your house has to be taxed even if it then leaves without you using it. I figure a tax judge isn’t going to mind if you have good records).
The only reason I’m a little upset about the Amazon thing is that I was going to start subtracting the “Prius Owner Punishment Tax” and the “Sales Tax CHeater Add-On Tax” from my sales tax owed each year.
(The first is the extra money they are charging for Prius owners because we supposedly get better gas mileage and aren’t paying “our fair share”. But I don’t drive my car that much, and I drive poorly, so I don’t save that much. I was going to calculate how much I saved over owning a fuel-efficient non-hybrid, and subtract that from the $50 they charge me and remove that amount from my “use tax”.)
(The second is a .3% they were going to raise the sales tax to cover tax cheats who didn’t do their “use tax”. Once they did that, I was going to stop paying the “use tax”, since I was being punished for “not paying it” anyway. I thought it was bad enough the state never went after the cheaters, but when they “fixed that” by taxing ME extra (when I’m already taxed extra by paying the tax nobody else pays), they were going too far.
I was going to publicly disclose my adjustments as part of my Virginia tax submission, so that my signature was not perjury. I was then going to write my state representatives and tell them what I did. And wait to see if the state had the balls to try to take me to court for the money. Because I would have loved THAT publicity.
But since almost ALL of my purchases were Amazon, they’ll have my sales tax now, so I can’t do the adjustments. Oh well. At least I don’t have to spend hours keeping track anymore.
Why don’t you just lie on your income tax form? You could probably stiff them out of a lot more tax dollars.
Did you know that if you forge a “nonprofit organization” letter, you can get local stores to sell you without sales tax? Why not do that, since you think it is a good thing to stiff them out of the sales tax that is legally owed?
Is it because you are afraid you might get caught? Because neither of those two things I just suggested are any less illegal than what you are doing — it’s just that you have a greater chance of getting caught.
Our country is in a sad state when people only follow laws they are afraid of getting caught breaking.
Well, we are also in a sad state when people decide they should listen to their accountants rather than their conscience. After all, your accountant would tell you it’s fine to sleep with your neighbor’s wife.
Are people really choosing online stores based on which ones help them cheat on their taxes?
I don’t think so.
Of course, I think publicly declaring that you are going to change who you buy from so you can cheat on your taxes is probably not a smart thing.
Most states offer a 10% or more finders fee to people who turn in tax cheats. Imagine an enterprising person who came through FreeRepublic and collected the names of all the self-confessed non-use-tax payers.
NOTE: I do not think people should do that. I hate the idea of a nation of bounty hunters. I think people should do what is right because it is what is right, not because they are afraid of being caught.
3-d printed objects are going to be a game-changer.
In Virginia, they just added a new tax to owners of hybrid cars, because theoretically those people get better gas mileage and therefore are not paying “their fair share”. I think it would have been “fairer” if they had set a fuel standard instead, taxing everybody who bought a car which listed better than 40mpg highway for example. Still sucks in either case though.
But my point is — if a state decides that 3-d printing is costing them too much in sales tax, I would guess they will probably come up with a large tax on the raw material used in 3-d printers.
But I don’t know how that would work, or how else they could do taxes “fairly”; if you print something that would be cheap to buy, you shouldn’t pay as much in “tax” as you would if you print something that would have been “expensive” to buy.
I don’t think that 3d printing at this point is a real threat to the state sales tax. But I have a feeling that over time, sales tax is going to become a less-used form of taxation, because of the ways around it.
A lot of stores do because they operate real stores in states. To some degree, Amazon did compete against the bookstores by suggesting that you were “saving money” when in fact they just weren’t collecting your sales tax.
Amazon has actually been collecting sales tax for years — but only for resales on stores based in your state. I’d have a few things I bought each year that were taxed. I made sure to exclude them from my calculations.
But i don’t make my online purchase decisions based on sales tax, or even always based on price (most of the time it is price). Sometimes it is just convenience — getting any product I want at my doorstep in 2 days, rather than having to run out to a store.
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