Posted on 06/21/2018 7:58:37 AM PDT by Reno89519
WASHINGTON (AP) — The Supreme Court says states can force online shoppers to pay sales tax.
The 5-4 ruling Thursday is a win for states, who said they were losing out on billions of dollars annually under two decades-old Supreme Court decisions that impacted online sales tax collection.
The high court ruled Thursday to overturn those decisions.
snip
“Each year the physical presence rule becomes further removed from economic reality and results in significant revenue losses to the States. These critiques underscore that the physical presence rule, both as first formulated and as applied today, is an incorrect interpretation of the Commerce Clause,” he wrote.
(Excerpt) Read more at apnews.com ...
most new or complicated accounting processes could be solved by point of entry methods which generate automatic reports.
You once again are missing the point. That article discusses states imposing duties on imports FROM FOREIGN COUNTRIES.
https://www.law.cornell.edu/anncon/html/art1frag103_user.html#pg399
Has nothing to do with taxing products sold in one state but delivered to the consumer in another state.
Once again you jump to conclusions irrelevant to what I said which was CONDITIONAL on the issue being one state taxing another state and also saying that even if the decision was constitutional, it is NOT national law.
I suspect most states will find that existing laws already apply. Few, if any, will have to pass laws.
That's the way the laws are written. They put the onus on the consumer. The consumers are to blame for not reporting and paying the tax. It's been that way forever, because no one could justify trying to force an out-of-state company to track the hundreds, if not thousands, of state/local sales tax laws when it had no presence in that state. With the advent of computer systems and databases, these things could be done, but it would still be a nightmare for most companies.
For example, in New Mexico, we have a gross receipts tax. It is similar to, but not exactly the same as, a sales tax. It's more like a Value Added Tax (VAT). Each and every local jurisdiction and county has the ability to set a rate over and above the existing 5.125% state rate. These rates often change quarterly. There are 136 municipalities and 33 counties. Some municipalities (Rio Rancho) for example, are split between two counties. This means that, depending on a street address in Rio Rancho, the tax rate could be either 8% or 7.4375%.
Right now, Amazon has agreed to collect the base state rate from all sales in New Mexico, but to track it at the proper rate for each municipality would nightmarish, even for them.
That is simply not true
When I go to a local retailer, I cannot tell him to not charge me the tax, and I'll pay it myself.
This really puts local retailers at a 7-10% price disadvantage to the folks like Amazon
Sales tax where I live is ten cents on the dollar. They can never suck enough of our money for this damnable government, and most of us don’t get much in direct benefits coming back our way.
Ginsburg in majority in a 5 -4 case?
““In effect, Quill has come to serve as a judicially created tax shelter for businesses that decide to limit their physical presence and still sell their goods and services to a state’s consumers—something that has become easier and more prevalent as technology has advanced,” Kennedy wrote. “This Court should not prevent states from collecting lawful taxes through a physical presence rule that can be satisfied only if there is an employee or a building in the state.”
The opinion was joined by Justices Clarence Thomas, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Samuel Alito and Neil Gorsuch, with Thomas and Gorsuch writing short concurrences.
Chief Justice John Roberts wrote a dissent that was joined by Justices Stephen Breyer, Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan.
“E-commerce has grown into a significant and vibrant part of our national economy against the backdrop of established rules, including the physical-presence rule,” Roberts said. “Any alteration to those rules with the potential to disrupt the development of such a critical segment of the economy should be undertaken by Congress.”
The court was considering whether to overrule precedents that date from eras when out-of-state shopping meant shopping by mail-order catalog.”
That is exactly the truth. The laws were written that way. The consumer never followed the law and paid the taxes, that's why the states are now going after the companies in the age of the internet. Most states already have the laws on their books placing the onus on the consumer for reporting and paying taxes on purchases made from out of state and shipped to the consumer.
When you go to the local retailer, they don't have that option. Yes, they're being forced to be an agent of the state and collect the sales tax on the sale. But when the laws were created, for out-of-state sales, they placed the burden on the consumer, since they didn't expect the out-of-state seller to be able to maintain data on thousands of tax rates.
You are living in a dream world of unicorns and lollipops.
One state is not taxing another state. It is requiring someone to perform a task IF they want to do business in that state.
We already lost this in CA a few years back, no?
Read your state's sales tax laws and get back to me. I know for a fact that most states with a sales tax also place the burden on the consumer for paying the sales tax on out of state purchases. It may be called a use tax or consumption tax, but it's there. The burden is on the consumer, not the retailer, if the retailer has no physical location in your state.
Here is Idaho's, which is where I grew up, and I'm the most familiar with it. https://legislature.idaho.gov/statutesrules/idstat/Title63/T63CH36/SECT63-3621/. This shows where the burden falls. It explicitly states the burden is on the consumer of the goods, unless it falls on the retailer, and describes exactly when it falls on the retailer. Please note, the act of doing business in the state does not include out of state sellers shipping goods into the state and who have no physical presence or agents within the state.
Here's the definition of "Retailers engaging in business in this state" - https://legislature.idaho.gov/statutesrules/idstat/Title63/T63CH36/SECT63-3611/
Technically, it’s a sales tax, not a purchase tax. An online sale is the ‘same’ thing as you driving to the other state and buying it there. So, really, online sales would best make sense to simply be taxed in the location they are sold from. States with low sales tax will tend to have more online sales stores, and the local brick n mortars will have the same competition level.
As I said, you are living in the world of unicorns and lollipops if you think the consumer will pay a sales tax not included in the sale.
Calculating the amount of tax paid could be the easiest part, there will be hundreds of companies by tomorrow that offer the service. It will be an added cost though. However, paying tax out to each state, each having their own deadlines for when they need to be paid, could be a nightmare.
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