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Comment by jbooth | Hacker News Reader

I don't think it's at all unreasonable for states to want to enforce the tax that's already on the books and supposed to be already reported/collected, as you state.

The problem is the hangup with the commerce clause. Catalog companies didn't threaten to make a significant % of all sales into postal sales, the internet does. I'd hope that we could find a way to straighten things out where the state can still assess the sales tax the way it's written legally without bringing all of these other issues about affiliates into it.

I don't really see where states can go on this, the current strategy seems to be "try and force congressional or SC action", good luck with that. Maybe they just fold on sales tax altogether and shift that burden to income tax.

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Catalog companies didn't threaten to make a significant % of all sales into postal sales, the internet does.

I am not so sure of that. Particularly in rural states, companies like Sears-Roebuck were the prime source of all sorts of amenities of basic life, from phonographs to sewing machines. Sure, it took longer, but the prices were a lot better than general stores. And the selection was amazing. You could buy anything up to and including a new house! (Some assembly required.)

Sears-Roebuck even sold houses.

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sears_Catalog_Home]

They could sign on to the Streamlined Sales Tax Project that Amazon is in favor of (as well as 44 states and D.C.)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Streamlined_Sales_Tax_Project

I can totally understand why Amazon doesn't want to have to collect municipal sales tax. Every city in my state has a different potential tax rate, with a percentage determined by the state, by the county, by whether the city participates in mass transit, etc. Same zip codes have different taxes.

Trying to manage that across the country is an ugly proposition! At least the EU has chosen a single VAT (even if it is outrageous! :).

the EU doesn't have a single VAT, or a even a single VAT rate. Each country can choose its own. But if you sell from country A to a resident of country B, you have to charge your country A VAT (in most end-consumer situations) just like you charge to a country A resident. (unless you get real big, then you have to collect country B VAT instead...)

I only we had machines which could perform these difficult lookups for us, and directories of information that could be queried to determine which taxes apply for a given address, along with some way for these machines to communicate so that different tax jurisdictions could keep the sales tax information current... Oh, that's right, we do.

The claim that determining the applicable sales tax for any given shipping/billing address is difficult is complete BS.

I disagree.

One small example: many jurisdictions tax different categories of items at different rates. This means that you'd have to start off by knowing those rules and categorizing everything accordingly. After that, you have tons of edge cases to work out, e.g., what happens if I group two different categories of items into a special package? What percentage of the package is taxed at what rate? Or, what if different states categorize the same item in different ways? Or, what happens when you provide a service to sellers and then need the sellers to accurately provide all of this categorization for every jurisdiction?

Of all companies, Amazon probably has the best chance of getting this all figured out if they really had to. However, calling it difficult is by no means BS.

Adding on to your excellent point, which tax configuration do you use for calculating the tax? If the affiliate is what causes nexus, do you use the affiliates local tax rates for calculating tax obligation or do you use the customer's local tax rates for calculating tax obligation? It seems absurd to me that I would pay more in taxes if I click on a link from Alice's website than I would if I were linked to the same product on Bob's website.

Oh come on. The reason Amazon doesn't want to collect sales tax is because it would make it more expensive to buy stuff on Amazon. They're well aware that few/no people actually pay their sales tax for internet purchases.

I'm not arguing on the rights/wrongs of this discussion, but this is what it really comes down to.

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