Texas sends Amazon a $269M uncollected sales tax bill
techflash.com
techflash.com
"Amazon.com was audited for sales tax covering the time period of December 2005 to December 2009. They were assessed a liability and billed in August 2010. The company has requested a re-determination which means this is an ongoing audit and could be decided as part of the administrative hearings process. The company would send documents and this process will continue."
I for one order all of my expensive hardware from out of state...
What this always sounds like to me is that ecommerce broke the American sales tax system. Transferring responsibility to individuals is obviously a nonexistent solution to loose ends that never got tied up because they represented such a small portion of sales. I really don't understand how this will get fixed again without nationalizing sales tax.
Two of the biggest mail order retailers were Sears and Montgomery Ward. To make sure that customers reached for the Sears catalog first, they made theirs slightly smaller (about 1 cm smaller in width and height) so that the folks in the house would stack the smaller catalog (Sears) on top of the larger one (MW). Those old catalogs had everything: clothes, furniture, tools and even house kits.
The 1897 one even had opium: http://www.amazon.com/1897-Sears-Roebuck-Catalogue-Israel/dp...
click on computer. thing arrives at my door. vs get in car, drive in traffic, deal with idiot shoppers, salesoids etc.
Amazon has fulfillment centers in Texas and a subsidiary as well. This may be sufficient to trigger Texas' state sales tax laws.
However, in this case Amazon had at least one warehouse and at least one office in TX.
All the orders are taken by Amazon Bermuda.
So, if a state were to try to enforce a tax on mail-order goods from out of state, but did not tax those goods when bought in state, then they would be in for a Constitutional smack down.
This gets interesting when a tax was also collected by the state the goods came from. What the courts have decided is that the destination state can only collect the difference between what the receiver paid to the origin state and what the tax would have been for a local purchase. Thus, if you buy a car in a state with a 4% tax, and then take it to a state with a 6% tax and try to register it there, they can collect 2%.
None of this, though, is the issue in this case. No one seriously disputes that Texas can make Texas residents pay this tax. The issue is whether Texas can make Amazon collect the tax at time of purchase for Texas. If not, Texas will have to ask its residents to track their Amazon purchases themselves and remit the tax they owe. That's what most states do now--and it is widely ignored. Most people, in fact, have no idea that they are supposed to keep track of the out of state purchases and pay state tax on them.
During the dotcom days I was assigned to research the implications of interstate transactions, and honestly, all that nexus stuff was dizzying.
I only recall hearing periodically (every couple of years) that the ecommerce sales tax moratorium (if you can call it that) had been extended yet again. Is that still the case?
Wouldn't that imply that a vendor could just not charge sales tax and not be fined for it? Which doesn't seem right.
Let's say tomorrow some country decides that any website their citizenry has access to is taxable. At what point does a company just say "not worth it". That decision would have a more to do with the wealth and power of the country than objective merit of the claims.