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Comment by whatshisface | Hacker News Reader

You don't normally have to give Stripe location information for US customers. The problem happened when he enabled tax support for Canadians.

Enabling tax support in Canada breaks US subscriptions... who knew.

> I built out my Stripe Tax integration, made sure I had all the addresses I needed for my Canadian customers (Canada is the only jurisdiction I run my business, and therefore only need to charge tax to Canadian customers), and updated all my customer subscriptions, awaiting the glory of automatic GST, HST and PST to be charged, and Stripe Tax taking all my headaches away.

> I deployed it on November 6, 2021, the same day that Stripe stopped billing a significant number of my customers, left all their invoices in a Draft state, and didn’t tell me about it.

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He didn't enable "Stripe Tax for Canada". He enabled Stripe Tax.

The whole selling point of Stripe Tax is that it calculates tax for customers in every supported location. It needs customer location to function. He's supposed to charge tax in other locations where it's required too.

Using Stripe Tax to only handle tax for customers in the home region of the company when the company also sells outside the home region seems like a strange goal.

Missing the forest for the trees.

Who wants to be a global hallway monitor for taxes? It makes more sense to pay for a tool that makes you compliant with the applicable tax laws, and forget about the rest.

> Using Stripe Tax to only handle tax for customers in the home region of the company when the company also sells outside the home region seems like a strange goal.

It's a common goal. When becoming compliant with sales tax laws, it makes sense to prioritize the states/countries where the business has a physical presence.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sales_tax#Enforcement_of_tax_o...

Better yet, if you don't have a physical presence in the USA (eg: the item was shipped from Canada), then the obligation of remitting the appropriate taxes often falls to the purchaser: https://www.avalara.com/blog/en/north-america/2016/12/guide-...

Incorrect, this is out of date.

It's your responsibility but only over a threshold (and the rules / amount are different in every US state)

It is your responsibility, but the specifics of impact and enforcement are complicated. This looks like a nice summary: https://baranovcpa.ca/us-sales-tax/

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