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Comment by dmurray | Hacker News Reader

If your New York business sells something to someone in Oklahoma, you don't have to charge NY sales tax. That's not controversial or a grey area (edit: until 2018). I don't know exactly how they structured this transaction, but if it ended up in Oklahoma it seems to be within the spirit of the law.

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> If your New York business sells something to someone in Oklahoma, you don't have to charge NY sales tax

Are you sure about that? It seems that at least online businesses don't work that way.[1]

1. https://turbotax.intuit.com/tax-tips/self-employment-taxes/s...

I'm not an expert, but that link seems to agree with me (note we are talking about a transaction circa 2014).

> If your business has a physical presence, or “nexus”, in a state, you must collect applicable sales taxes from online customers in that state.

> If you do not have a physical presence, you generally do not have to collect sales tax for online sales. However, in June of 2018, the U.S. Supreme Court issued a ruling that will likely change this exemption to collecting sales tax.

Ah got it. It may have been legal at the time.

The buyer is still responsible for paying a 'use tax' in that case (which is typically identical to the sales tax rate).

This is referring to the sales tax in the buyer's state. I'm not aware of any state that requires sales tax in the seller's state for orders that were not made or received in that state.

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