Monday, August 29, 2016

Taxing Interstate purchases

Congressman Bob Goodlatte of of Virginia has an idea to facilitate the taxation of interstate purchases over the internet. Predictably it's complicated and makes no allowance for any taxes collected below the State level.
 For example, an Ohio company shipping a pair of pants to Maryland would use Ohio’s rules for taxing clothing and Maryland’s tax rate.
If Maryland want's fewer people to wear pants, they should by all means figure out how to tax out of state pants purchases. If they prefer more people to wear pants, then maybe they should lower their own tax on them.

Try this analogy: Colorado state tax is 3.9%, Denver City tax is 4%. Arapahoe county tax is 3%. A cup of coffee at Micky D's is $1 plus tax. If I buy at the MD's in Denver that cup costs me $1.08, in Littleton county it's $1.07 and in unincorporated Arapahoe county it may be as low as $1.04. So should the MD's in unincorporated Arapahoe county be required to check the ID's of all its customers and add the local tax appropriate to the customers residence to the bill?

1 comment:

David Aitken said...

I used to have a client that sold a lot of product out of state. Each customer had several tax codes, one for each jurisdiction they were in, so a customer in Denver had 3 rates - Colorado, RTD, and Denver. They were stored in a tax file and not the customer file, so the actual rate was only in the system once. If Colorado's rate changed, you changed it once (on the tax file), and all the Colorado customers got the new rate. It wasn't hard; it just required some out of the box thinking.