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Comment by d23 | Hacker News Reader

Seriously? Anything less than $1 million is already exempt, and they're still complaining?

I've been happy not paying sales tax on Amazon for years now, but when I heard there would be a law forcing them to collect, I didn't freak out. We had a good run of having to pay nothing. I didn't expect it to last forever.

Do people really want to avoid putting money back into the country at every turn? This is still America, and it's still great to live here. Taxes let it stay that way. Sure, we may not always like what they're being spent on, but that's a necessary part of being a citizen.

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If you have a 3% gross margin and a million a year in revenue, you don't have enough money to hire even a single full time employee. Who is going to handle the new requirement to integrate 50 different software packages this bill requires the states make available to compute sales tax at purchase time, to fill out 50 sales tax forms every quarter/year, to cut and keep track of 50 checks...

A $1M/year seller could easily spend their entire year's profit just paying someone to keep track of which of the states have opted in to the new programs this bill will create, research the sales tax laws and forms in those states, research their software/APIs, build the integrations, etc.

If a federal sales tax law simply meant cutting one check and sending one spreadsheet to some authority that then divvies out the payments to the appropriate governments, that'd be something else. I don't think that's been proposed.

I guess I assumed it would be handled through ebay's payment system. If not, I could see how that would be a pain. Still, that's only 50 checks a year. Doesn't seem that difficult.

What about everyone that sells online and doesn't do it through eBay?

You go out of business because your margin was razor thin. Obviously.

[deleted: don't feed trolls]

If that's the only argument then I hope it passes. Why should some minuscule number of small businesses hold everything up?

It's not the 50 checks a year, it's knowing 50 state laws (which are not all the same with regard to what is and is not taxed, and can and do change), tracking, computing, and being ready to prove to 50 jurisdictions that you've complied with their laws. If so much as one of them decides to challenge you on it, you can probably kiss your profits for the year goodbye. Merely writing the checks is trivial.

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