Politico: E-tailers vs. retailers on tax issue
Politico has a comprehensive article today on the online sales tax debate going on throughout the country.
The only point we take issue with was this statement tucked in the middle of the article:
Another concern is that the crazy quilt of local and state taxing jurisdictions is too complex for online retailers, particularly small businesses, to manage.
This should not be a concern. Admittedly when the Supreme Court dealt with this issue in 1967 (Bellas Hess) and 1992 (Quill), such concerns of complexity were legitimate, but not anymore. Thanks to a decade of effort by 44 states and businesses to create the Streamlined Sales and Use Tax Agreement, our TaxCloud service now enables retailers (online and offline) to calculate and remit sales tax across the country—and for Streamlined states, it can also automatically handle registration and periodic filings, and will even respond to any jurisdictional audits. And most importantly, TaxCloud is completely free.
Finally, the Quill decision openly invited Congress to resolve this issue. We thank Senator Durbin and all other sponsoring senators for showing the courage to finally resolve this issue so individual states don’t have to keep pushing the boundaries of the definition of nexus just to collect the sales tax already due.
