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Comment by Symbiote | Hacker News Reader

In the EU, the site guesses the location based on the IP, writes "Delivery to Denmark [Change?]" and shows prices with Danish VAT.

If I'm signed in to the shop from making a previous purchase, they will use the location of the previous purchase.

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If Denmark has just one sales tax rate or VAT, then maybe that can work OK for Denmark.

But this isn't about Denmark -- it is about the US.

In the US, there are over 13,000 different sales tax jurisdictions, and each one of them may have a different tax rate.

I wish the best to anyone who would ever be tasked with sorting that out with any semblance of accuracy using IP geolocation databases.

Maybe not have 13000 different sales tax jurisdictions?

Just a thought...

It doesn't really work like that, though. Sales tax is up to the states to sort out how to deal with on their own, and there's 50 of them.

Nationally (or as some may prefer, "federallly"), the sales tax rate is already zero -- and has always been zero.

> Sales tax is up to the states to sort out how to deal with on their own, and there's 50 of them.

To add on for any else trying to figure out the 13k number from this statement.

Counties can also apply their own additional taxes.

Cities can also apply their own additional taxes.

On top of just that, the cities and counties can set different taxes in the same area, such as a sugar tax or an alcohol tax or even a pre-prepared food tax vs groceries. It gets complicated fast.

it can get really easy: just don't let this madness sprawl out of control? :)

per state, I understand the tax. set it per state, and be done with it. maybe split it in some % with the city (I don't know if cities directly get a portion of it already or not?), so it's a win-win.

Maybe that works. I have concerns about IP geolocation databases being able to pin me down to a particular state, but maybe.

But even assuming "good enough" IP geolocation exists: In order for this to be implemented both uniformly and nationally, we'd need a new constitutional amendment that would grant the federal government the ability to regulate how sales taxes work within states.

Because right now, we have this: "The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people."

The federal government doesn't need to legislate sales tax, just require it to be included in the display price. For physical stores this is trivial. For online stores geolocation + manual override works well enough elsewhere. Number of sales tax jurisdictions is irrelevant - either companies deal with it like they deal in areas with many smaller countries or they lobby their local city / state to fix the mess.

Sales tax in the Atlanta airport varies because the terminal crosses jurisdiction lines. Geolocation needs an exact location to get the tax correct, which means giving your exact location to every shopping site. Most people don't want to do that and already know what the tax rate at their home is so they already know what to expect at checkout.

This is a very good argument FOR requiring that the tax must be included in the display price. Travelers going through ATL can't be expected to know the tax code for whatever gate they have been funneled to.

Then have the entire terminal a single tax jurisdiction, federal-taxes-only one. Or apply a front door rule like Baarle does.

Yeah, consolidate all of them into three VATs: Contiguous US VAT, Oceanic US VAT and Alaska VAT.

Take a good guess and let the user type in their zip code?

Zip codes are for postal routing, not tax rates.

Items I order at home are subject to a 7.25% sales tax rate.

My neighbor across the street (our front doors are maybe 80 feet apart) pays 6.75%.

We both live in the same zip code. We both live within the same city. We both live in the same school district. We each live in two different counties.

(And up the road a bit, a third county is involved instead.)

Enter your county then? Dunno enter something to differentiate.

That seems simple, too.

But some cities have their own sales taxes in addition to (or instead of) county sales taxes, so county alone isn't good enough.

Besides, there's literally 30 different counties in the US named "Hancock".

(If this were an easy problem to solve it'd have been solved a long time ago.)

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I think we're already back to where we started, wherein: In order to display an accurate sales tax, we need to know the address, city, and state of the buyer.

This seems less like a defense of pre-tax prices and more like an indictment of a thoroughly ridiculous tax system.

Not at all. I'm really not trying to defend anything here.

It is my considered opinion that it is all quite resoundingly fucked.

Yes bc in the EU there is national VAT. In the US there is state and local sales tax. You can and will pay different sales tax between cities in a given state.

You can do this, albeit slightly less reliably, in the US as well. The geolocation isn't perfect, but you could easily put "With delivery to XXXXX [edit]" where XXXXX is a zip code you geolocate off an ip (or lookup in a user profile for a recurring user).

The zip code is not fine grained enough to identify tax jurisdictions in many places in the US.

A lot of sites, for example Amazon, don't update VAT until checkout, even if you set "Ship to [country]" when searching. Then the price suddenly jumps.

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