US Senate Passes National Internet Sales Tax Mandate

SonicSpike writes with the news that the U.S. Senate yesterday "passed a nonbinding proposal to allow states to collect sales tax on Internet sellers that have no presence within their borders. The proposal was an amendment to a 2014 budget bill that the Senate debated Friday. It was pushed by Senators Mike Enzi, a Wyoming Republican, and Dick Durbin, an Illinois Democrat, and was designed to give backers a sense of whether they had enough votes to push forward with final legislation to impose an Internet sales tax. The vote showed they have plenty of backing to overcome any filibuster seeking to block a final sales tax bill."

Re:First! (State)

[Anonymous Coward]

As an Oregon online retailer, I can say that this will be big pain in the ass, because I'll go from collecting tax for zero states to collecting tax for 46 states, and having to calculate all the various kinds of taxes levied by cities and municipalities. It's going to be a fucking nightmare, which is why the supreme court stopped it in the first place.

At least Ron Wyden is doing his damn job by fighting it.

Re:First! (State)

[RougeFemme]

The issue is not that it's that effen hard - it's not. And larger retailers are already doing this. My zip code crosses 2 jurisdictions and a couple of the large retailers always ask me whether I live in jurisdiction A or B. We don't pay local sales taxes here, but obviously these large retailers are already collecting it in states that do. The issue for smaller retailers is cost.

Re:First! (State)

[WindBourne]

That is why I think that we should be offered the option to apply a flat 10% sales tax that is collected by the shipping firm. Then the shipping firm is allowed to keep say 5% of that, for handling it. With this approach, it would make it trivial for anybody, including foreign firms, to pay the sales taxes. And at 10%, where will be districts that are higher than it, but on average, the majority is bought at around 7-8% sales tax. As such, this is not too far from where it needs to be, and it removes all of the overhead of paperwork, lawyers, etc.

Re:First! (State)

[cob666]

Before you can even collect sales tax you will have to register with each state and pay for a sales tax id ($100 for CT alone). I don't believe for a second that states are going to give sales and use tax ids away for free either. I don't see how this is going to work for anything but the largest online retailers and I'm still not convinced that this doesn't violate interstate commerce.

Instead of requiring retailers to PAY the sales tax, they should only be required to remit sales logs and let the state collect the use tax from whoever purchased the goods. But, that makes too much sense and would again put the responsibility on the state to collect the money when all they really want is a ride on the internet sales gravy train.

What would be nice...

[Junta]

If they do demand this, they should provide some online framework. Buyers address and total gets sent in a standardized format to respective state ran sales tax servers, and the server spits out the correct amount. If the state gets the tax wrong, the seller should never be responsible for the mistake.