From an outsider point of view, this looks insane.
If one of your costumers is in another jurisdiction, you have to comply with its rules?
Shouldn't the jurisdiction impose its rules on its inhabitants, rather than everyone else?
If one of your costumers is in another jurisdiction, you have to comply with its rules?
Shouldn't the jurisdiction impose its rules on its inhabitants, rather than everyone else?
http://taxfoundation.org/article/amazon-tax-unconstitutional... http://netchoice.org/library/sales-tax-collection-myth-vs-re... http://salestaxguy.blogspot.com/2010/06/golden-rule-there-is... http://law2.umkc.edu/faculty/projects/ftrials/conlaw/interst...
Several states already do levy sales taxes on online stores selling to their residents, and lawsuits challenging those taxes were dropped or settled because it became clear that they would either lose or instigate the passage of a federal law allowing states to tax internet commerce.
The key here, that the CEO utterly failed in, was creating a nexus in 35 states. That doesn't sound like an example of the I assume special cases listed. But IANAAccountant, am not subject to any of this craziness, so don't take my guess for much of anything, but I'll bet this was a relatively white line mistake.
Similarly, if you're a computer consultant who lives in Iowa and you drive to Illinois to service a customer's mainframe or install a software package on their workstations, or whatever else it is you do, you're engaged in the service business in Illinois. Some software consultants seem not to realize this.
One difference is that it's easier for a small-time consultant to do on-site business in more than 2 or 3 states nowadays, thanks to cheap flights, which would've taken a lot of driving in 1935 to pull off. One solution is to decide that there's so much cross-border commerce going on that the U.S. is basically a national market, and federalize/harmonize the tax and business-regulation laws. That'd simplify compliance for multi-state businesses by removing the legal distinction between doing business within your state vs. across state lines. On the other hand it'd remove some local choice which is fairly popular in the US. So far the piecemeal solution seems to be that the federal government has harmonized a few regulations, e.g. car-safety standards (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geier_v._American_Honda_Motor_...), to let a few industries avoid the complexities of balkanized 50-state regulations, but hasn't done anything general.
Now, if that created a nexus for all your business in that state, like sales tax on the entire thing installed---say you work for the Maytag dealer from whom the refrigerator was bought, across state lines---I'd call that a special case, but I'd expect it to come up when checking to see if service was covered.