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Comment by dbjacobs | Hacker News Reader

The good news, is that so far most states seem to be modeling their legislation after South Dakotas so hopefully there won't be a ton of rule variation.

The filing requirement is the real kicker. Until small business software like Quickbooks and Turbotax for business makes it trivial to file in every state. The compliance cost will be VERY high. In Hawaii for example, you have to file and pay your excise tax return every month. Multiple that by every state and you have a lot of work.

I suspect those companies that sell inexpensive items will probably restrict the number of states they sell to until the software support is there.

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Congress has the ability to nationalize sales tax collection and remittance across State borders and bills have been introduced in the past that propose to do just that.

So with this decision we might (should) see Congress solving this issue. The Supreme Court had practically begged Congress to act before overturning Quill.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/beltway/2018/03/21/congress-has...

>In its 1992 ruling in Quill v. North Dakota, the High Court said states could require retailers to collect sales tax only if those businesses had a substantial physical presence — known in legalese as nexus — in their jurisdictions. But the Court, which called the legal issues surrounding nexus a “quagmire,” strongly urged Congress to resolve the many unanswered questions surrounding remote sales: “The underlying issue is not only one that Congress may be better qualified to resolve, but also one that Congress has the ultimate power to resolve.”

Which is, in fact, the point of the Roberts' led dissent as well. Basically that this would be better off as a Congressional effort and that, by overturning Quill--even though there were good reasons to do so--the majority has thrown a wrench into ongoing efforts to work towards a national solution.

As others pointed out when this topic first came up, there are services like TaxJar that will collect and file sales taxes. The challenge is that you have to set all of this up of course and connect it to your accounting systems in some way. And the cost for collecting and filing in all relevant states seems to be something over $10K/year (assuming that there aren't now also business licenses, etc. required).

One can hope that states will approach this sensibly. One expects that at least some will not and, best case, there are going to be some compliance costs for small businesses.

Further tightening the near-monopoly those companies have over the processing of legally required tax filings. They're the only real winners here. If is not possible for a small business owner or individual to realistically handle their own tax filings, the onus is on the government to address the complexity of their tax laws and regulations.

There are multiple companies, and none of them have anywhere near to a monopoly share. Not only that, many companies will develop this capability in house, and the margins for this service start getting excessive, those companies will have a good incentive to offer it externally.

So yes, these services won't cheap, but that'll be due mostly to intrinsic costs, not monopoly rents.

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