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Comment by nacho2sweet | Hacker News Reader

Programming one of these for a Canadian website for provincial tax to hook into another recurring payment script, that hooked into PayPal was an annoying overhead especially when the company was bootstrapped and had like $0 revenue to even care about at that point.

I would hope Stripe or people using online services like Shopify will quickly add support for everyone. But the state by state, county by county, grocery vs non grocery stuff sounds like a goddamn nightmare.

EDIT: You won't be able to just be some just launch it break stuff and fix later SASS. You will have to keep track of all this shit and send out 50 different cheques, or track when your company has reached the minimum to have to pay sales tax back.

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The support for this has been there on Shopify for quite some time. With a tool like https://www.taxjar.com/ I was able to easily pay all the state, county and city taxes in a few minutes for my wife's small online shop.

Still, tested correctness is different from guaranteed correctness. Either the taxation is unambiguously defined in law (howver scattered within the law) or it is not and we have void for vagueness.

The people who define the taxation are payed by taxes, so why not require the deliverable to include a cryptographically signed algorithm? Then all the shops can have free peace of mind:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17367669

What is likely to happen is Congress will finally pass the Marketplace Fairness Act which requires states to comply with the Streamlined Sales and Use Tax Agreement before they can collect the sales tax. 23 states already fully comply with the agreement.

As part of the agreement those entities without a physical presence in the state pay only a single state agency all sales tax and not have to pay tax to individual localities within the state. For each state the type of products subject to tax and the rates of tax on them are uniform across the state.

The states are also required to make available free of charge databases with boundaries and the tax rate on goods within each boundary. States must not hold any businesses liable for the under or over collection of taxes based upon any errors in their database. In addition the Streamlined Sales Tax Board of Governors certifies service providers. If a busines uses a certified service provider they are not liable for under or over collection of taxes based upon an error by the service provider. There are currently 7 certified providers. The certified service providers provide data regarding what taxes need to be collected on a transaction, will collect the tax on behalf of the business and submit it to the state on behalf of the business. Many e-commerce platforms already integrate with one or more CSPs. I imagine those that don't today will quickly do so or if large enough become a CSP themselves.

Brick and mortar don't get to do that either, so why should online ones?

When I launch a single brick and mortar store, I have to worry about the tax jurisdiction that store is in.

When I launch a single small web app, I have to worry about everything single tax jurisdiction in the country.

I'm super not opposed to taxes, but I do think this is an area that the federal government should step in. If only to provide a standardized system for different jurisdictions to report their sales tax laws.

It seems like a very very clear use of the commerce clause and regulation of interstate commerce.

Congress has had decades to step in. They declined to, largely due to an anti-tax sentiment among a large block of them. Absent a resolution from Congress, and no indication that they'd do anything, the courts had to work with what they were given.

We should differentiate between 1) standardizing the tax calculation algorithm, and 2) standardizing the taxation rates

As long as the two are conflated nothing will change. Irrespective of political/personal/ideological position on nr.2) I think most of us can agree on nr.1)... (except for the bigger chains, and the FUD navigation services.

That analogy is not perfect, if you restrict your web app to only serve people within the same single tax jurisdiction as the brick and mortar store, then there is no need to worry about every single tax jurisdiction.

But I fully agree with you regarding the need for the federal government standardizing.

See my comment at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17367669

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