What is Internet sales tax, and will it cripple e-commerce? | Hacker News Reader

What is Internet sales tax, and will it cripple e-commerce?

extremetech.com

27 pointsrbii23 comments

I'll support this just as soon as B&M retailers are required to find out where their customers live and collect sales taxes accordingly as well.

Out of interest, what's a B&M retailer?

B&M = Brick & Mortar, a reference to their physical stores.

Oh, that's a pretty silly comment then, it's where their store is. Given that people have to supply a card and/or delivery address when buying it's not going to be a massive pain for online retailers.

And web retailers are willing to handle sales taxes where their stores are. The difference is that they're being expected to handle sales taxes for cities and states they don't actually have any presence in - ie, in every state and municipality that has a sales tax.

Indeed. I live in one city and do most of my work in a neighboring city. They both have sales taxes, but the rates are different, and (more important for this discussion) the exceptions (which rate applies to a specific item) are subtly different. I've been here ten years and I still have to think about it -- when I care. Usually I don't bother to worry about it; it's not a significant difference on most individual purchases. A retailer wouldn't have that luxury. And how in the world is a retailer supposed to determine if I'm buying the item in City A and using it in City B, or vice-versa? That happens a lot - the shipping address I give has more to do with where I'm likely to be at delivery time than where the item will actually be used. Will City A start demanding its cut of items delivered in City B? Will I have to pay taxes to both cities? What happens if I rent a mail drop in neighboring Village C that doesn't even have a local sales tax? What happens when a state with major online retailers (say, "Washingham") starts levying a punitive counter-tax on items purchased from a state (say, "Sickinois") that's insistent on collecting mail-order sales tax? That'll do wonders for the Sickinois economy, won't it?

"Oh, that's a pretty silly comment then, it's where their store is. Given that people have to supply a card and/or delivery address when buying it's not going to be a massive pain for online retailers."

So why can't it apply the same way to online merchants? Where their business is located?

You obviously don't run an online store. It's not as easy as just charging them tax. There are so many different tax rates (that are constantly changing btw) that it's going to be very difficult for any small retailer to keep this up-to-date.

It would be much easier to just require the customer to claim it on their tax forms (which I believe is already a requirement).

To claim this is "lost revenue" is about the same as when the RIAA claims piracy is lost revenue.

What about taxing delivery services instead? If states charged a flat tax on UPS and Fedex, distributed proportionally to cities, would it be enough to fill the gap in state and city budgets?

The gap can be filled by customer being a little more honest about what they purchase out of state.

Don't be absurd, that's not going to work.

Do you go after 300 million people or do you go after 10s of thousands?

This is a problem with your states, not with the general idea that in the US the internet retailers are getting away with helping people avoid sales tax at the moment.

This was inevitable, if you didn't see it coming you're a fool.

Also this type of 'problem' is easily automated by computers, you're just going to have to pay for it.

I think what you are claiming is disingenuous, if this was actually the issue then they could easily set some lower income bound on having to collect the tax (eg $10mil/year or something). It's not the mom & pop stores selling stuff online that the government is worried about; it's Amazon and other huge online retailers.

Amazon is able to handle the import duties for dozens and dozens of countries, each of which have complex rules that depend heavily on the actual product. Sales tax is strictly easier than what they are already doing, and saying that it is too complex for them to handle is simply absurd.

Gosh would that ever be a destabilizing force on American cities.

Right now, from a municipal funding perspective, homes with children are revenue negative, homes without children are roughly revenue neutral, office/industry is profitable, and retail is VERY profitable. (all this is before you take into account tax incentives for relocation/retention.)

Why will cities fight over a mall, or a car dealership, or a corporate headquarters? A mall draws in shoppers from far beyond municipal borders and the (local part of the) sales tax stays with the physical location. When you pay tax on a new car, you're paying multiple years worth of sales tax on driving in one go. If you buy a car in a different city than where you live, it's like if you shopped in that city every single week for the entire time you own the car. Offices are the same as malls in that they draw from beyond municipal boundaries.

If all of a citizen's sales taxes went to the city they lived in, as opposed to where they shopped, then you'd see local (or at least small scale, localized) commerce boom because no city would want to deal with the traffic, road construction and maintenance costs, etc that come with huge retail developments.

Dude, this is blowing my mind. This will be a blog post soon.

I'm familiar with the inter-state sales tax compliance functions at a number of firms and it is a tremendous burden. Not only most states, but numerous municipalities impose sales tax as well. As the article mentions, the problem is that Use tax[1] obligations are generally not paid by destination-state customers. This actually makes a great argument for why the federal government should collect a national sales tax, that is then distributed back to the states.

Regarding the legality of states attempts to collect sales tax on inter-state transactions, we can look to the commerce clause[2]. In the courts, one test that has been used is to ask whether a tax creates an unfair advantage for in-state commerce over inter-state commerce[3]. If you take into account the compliance demands created by an inter-state sales tax, I think the answer is almost always YES.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sales_and_use_tax

[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commerce_Clause

[3] http://law2.umkc.edu/faculty/projects/ftrials/conlaw/interst...

Now I don't really know how well it works in practice but the european model for VAT (the rough equivalent of sales tax) is basically this: if you're a small business, you don't have to collect VAT for the place you're sending the goods; but if you don't, you have to collect it for your own location (rather than collecting nothing). And over a certain business size, you do have to collect it for the destination.

The EU has fairly uniform VAT rates (around 20%), so then there isn't a huge difference to where you charge the tax, and so end consumer prices don't vary by a huge amount.

Maybe the much more variable rates in the US plus what seems to be more easier ability to move jurisdictions would lead to sales tax jurisdiction shopping a more than in europe.

These laws certainly will not help e-commerce shops, sales will decrease (or more likely continue to increase across the industry but not at such a rapid rate) because the e-comms will now be on a level playing field with brick and mortars.

All of this being said, the biggest problem will be simplicity. If there is not a service to easily distill all of these rules and plug into the bulk of shopping experiences (magento, atg, ep, shopify, etc) this will very much hurt small, up&coming e-comms.

I'd imagine there is very good opportunity for a company to create an API of all of this tax information and monetize it.

I'd imagine there is very good opportunity for a company to create an API of all of this tax information and monetize it.

I hope that doesn't happen. If the government is imposing this burden, there should be a free database available for everyone to allow compliance.

As a CPA with years of experience in specialized state and local tax issues. I can tell you that sales and use tax is very complex and burdensome. But, at the same time internet retailers have taken advantage of the the law's inability to keep up with new business models, so internet retailers have had an unfair advantage over brick and mortar companies.

Just giving the issue perspective from both sides.

What's the "unfair advantage"? If I run a physical store in my town and someone from out of state drives in and buys something, I'm not expected to make sure the appropriate sales tax on that item gets to that person's state or municipal government. I'm only responsible for whatever sales taxes (if any) exist where I physically am.

On the other hand, online merchants with physical stores already have to charge for sales taxes if their online customers are within those jurisdictions.

Requiring online merchants to collect the correct sales taxes for every state and town is either a stupid attempt to increase revenue or a straight attempt to hobble online sales on behalf of physical retailers.

If it's such a great advantage why aren't B&M shops closing down and replacing their stores with a shopify account?

Also, most internet sales are interstate commerce which the states have no business regulating. I can't believe the gall of the government to claim that using Amazon.com is not interstate commerce yet growing a plant in your basement for your own personal consumption is.

The SCOTUS is very clear that anything with the the potential to affect the interstate market for goods and services is interstate commerce.

Why can't the states respect that?

I have two points:

1. So the problem of calculating and distributing use tax is complex... That sounds like a business opportunity for a new kind of web service.

2. I think the issue just comes down to online retailers dragging their feet because they want to enjoy their advantage as long as possible.

1. You are 100 percent correct, the fact that this is supposedly a pain point will lead a lot of people to be the best at solving this and will drive the cost of collection to near zero. (Walmart.com already does it)

2. Of course, Amazon.com got CA to agree waiting before taxing bc they knew once people tried prime, they would be hooked and would pay the tax later since there will be no alternative.

"2. I think the issue just comes down to online retailers dragging their feet because they want to enjoy their advantage as long as possible."

I wish it were that simple. This bill would have effectively shut down my small business (we're an online retailer). The overhead of paying taxes across many different states and municipalities is, frankly, impossible for smaller teams / startups to deal with. Even if we could outsource this, it would effectively reduce our margins to the point where we couldn't compete with brick & mortar. We already collect taxes and pay them to the states we operate in. This bill wouldn't cause us to pay more tax (we're based in California, so we'd probably pay less taxes as a result), but instead seems like it's more a result of anti-competitive lobbying efforts from B&M retailers.

The pretty obvious solution, which I expect the government will eventually luck into, would be for the Federal government to collect a, say, 5% sales tax on all inter-state commerce. Remit 2% to state A, 2% to state B, keep 1% for itself, and everyone is happy. Easy to administer, easy to collect. Lucrative!

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