our accountant does our taxes and she has never asked for that information, so i had no clue.
I don’t bother with it, as Maryland’s sales tax is higher than ours.
I tried last year, after many FReepers pointed out that I was being a tax cheat. However, my accountant advised against it since I couldn't show all the records of on line purchases, and was trying to estimate 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.