You’re changing your tune, once again.
Earlier in this conversation you stated because Maryland’s tax is higher than Virginia’s I do not have to report “any” of those purchases, and now you are back to what you have previously told me about food (grocery store) purchases.
As I have said in the past, I do a certain amount of my grocery shopping in Maryland, just due to the nature of where I live. However, over the course of a year it is going to be a wash when I consider the higher tax I’m paying on all other items in comparison to what tax I would “owe” VA in unpaid food sales tax.
The statement about “maryland tax being higher than Virginia” is what we call a “generalization”.
When we are talking about whether one will ignore the law or not, discussing in generalities seems prudent; if we are talking about how much work we are willing to perform to follow a law we have decided to follow, then we have to get into specifics.
To be precise, if you paid sales tax on a purchase in Maryland, you do not have to report “any” of those purchases. Because if you paid sales tax, you paid 6%, which is higher than what you would pay in Virginia.
If you made purchases for which you did NOT pay sales tax, then you have to determine whether the items you purchased would be taxed in Virginia, and pay.
Since the nature of the conversation was “hey, I already paid taxes on the stuff I bought in Maryland, do I have to pay virginia as well”, the general answer “no, you do not”, is an appropriate one. It is only the things you did NOT pay tax on that you have to worry about.
It is worse if you buy from a state with a lower sales tax. Then even though you paid sales tax, you still technically owe more taxes.
Given Virginia’s complete lack of interest in catching people who don’t pay sales tax, and their instead passing a law to punish everybody equally for the crimes of the ones who do not, you won’t see me complaining about people who don’t go through the trouble of determining if they paid ENOUGH sales tax in some other state. Virginia certainly won’t.
The only circumstance where I could imagine Virginia going after a person who bought stuff in Maryland would be if that person publicly bragged about specifically buying all their non-taxed groceries in Maryland just to save the sales tax. But even then I doubt Virginia would bother.