Taxing authorities extend exemptions to wholesalers and O.E.M.s in order to avoid inadvertant levying of Value Added Taxes, where a product would increase price (cost to the consumer) by multiple iterations just for having more than one company handle it between manufacture and purchase. The O.E.M.s, final manufacturers, wholesalers, and anyone else in the chain all need to keep good records or the taxing authority (typically the state), will be quite happy to bust them for failure to report.
On the other hand, once a product has been purchased and used,the issue of the value added tax is considered irrelevant. The original buyer purchased the car, the house, the machinery, or whatever, paid the original tax, then used it for his, her, or their own purposes for some period of time. When the property or object is then offered for sale, again, it is considered a wholly separate transaction. There is not a simple chain of possession from manufacturer to ultimate buyer, in which successive taxes arbitrarily inflate the original manufacturer’s price to the ultimate buyer. The price will have already been modified by depreciation or appreciation, wear and tear, repair and enhancements, or any number of other events that are not being imposed by the state. At that point, the state figures that they have a right to claim a portion of this later transaction.