I doubt it. There just isn’t much incentive to go after small businesses for political reasons. If such a thing were gonna happen, you would see it happening already. Do you have any evidence liberal companies in conservative states (or vice versa) are audited more often?
My question is what does the federal government have to do with states collecting state sales taxes?
The Supreme Court ruled in Quill Corp v North Dakota and National Bellas Hess v Illinois that businesses whose only contacts with the taxing state are by mail or by common carrier lacks the “substantial nexus” required under the Dormant Commerce Clause.
In Quill Corp the court did state that Congress could overrule the decision through legislation. This is what the current bill seeks to do.
*NOTE: I got all this info off Wikipedia so please feel free to correct anything that is wrong.
I find it interesting that many states have “use” tax laws on their books but they are never enforced. Say I buy an item in a nontax state or one with a lower sales-tax rate than my resident state. I am supposed to pay my state the difference in taxes owed. Of course most people do not know about or just ignore these laws. How is this different from online purchases? Physical stores in one state are not required to collect sales tax for your home state…why would we expect internet companies to behave differently?
It’ll be a nightmare for me as a business owner. There are 7,000 tax jurisdictions in the US and we have customers in most of them. Now for each sale we need to keep track of which city, county and state get $0.47 from a sale and send it to them.
Physical stores need only worry about one jurisdiction.
How so? I can’t imagine the 2%-5% (or whatever the local sales tax is) price difference is why people are buying things online.
They keep talking about making Australia’s 10% GST applicable to stuff purchased online from overseas, bleating about how that will somehow “make it fairer” for local businesses, spectacularly overlooking the fact it’s often more than 50% cheaper to buy some things off the net instead of getting them locally.