to everyone else. keep voting democrat and our pockets will continue to be picked. Ny went dem and the tax craze began. for the little people…………right.

Helpful links:

An audiocast on the subject:
http://www.mfa-cpa.com/mfa-new.....lesTax.mp3

And a short white paper/Q&A:
http://www.mfa-cpa.com/mfa-new.....-May08.pdf

A vast majority of multi-state retailers are not fully compliant with ALL the tax laws.

If you have a company that must collect sales tax from every state, there ~7.5k jurisdictions (including state, county, etc) that collect tax on goods.
As people have stated above, these taxes can be both product AND time based. Several states do tax holidays on items. For example, clothing under $100 may be tax free for just the weekend. On top of that, many states collect tax on the shipping fee. So not only do you have your $20 UPS/FEDEX/Whatever shipping charge, there’s a tax on that $20 as well.
To make it even MORE complex there are tax scenarios that occur when shipping between certain states in which cases tax must be collect for BOTH states, usually at different rates for the same time.

Doing this for one state is not that big of a deal. Doing it for all of them will put some businesses … out of of business.

Even then, once you have everything all set up correctly, someone needs to monitor the tax laws in each state because they change ALL the time. To those who think it’s just as simple as calculating a percentage of the price, think again.

Such is the integrated world of online marketing. This is going to be extremely difficult to track and a number of major parties will have a major beef with it.

It’s simple an extension of the rules that have governed existing catalog businesses for quite some time. And if you stop to think about it, a web “store” is really nothing more than an electronic catalog.

I just think that NYC trying to say that affiliates are part of Amazon is a ridiculous stretch. Affiliates have a marketing arrangement, and are not owned by Amazon. Look at the Articles of Incorporation of any Amazon affiliate —- are they owned by Amazon? Not at all. Do they file joint taxes in April with Amazon? No. Then they are not owned.

The problem with this argument is that it fails to recognize that the local business receives myriad services from the state and local government that the internet business does not, its customers should therefore pay for the fair share of receiving those services. I’m thinking of government services such as police, roads for the customers to reach the store, education for the employee’s children, Medicaid, etc. The out-of-state internet business on the other hand does not benefit from these services and therefore their customers shouldn’t have to pay the sales taxes in their own state. They do pay for part of the roads used in shipping though gas taxes imposed on the Fedex/UPS trucks.

But one thing that has been unfair is the sales tax that customers of local bookstores must pay if they buy at the store but are forgiven if they buy from the Internet. This is basically unfair price competition not to mention the lost revenues faced by the city and state.

I think that requiring equal taxation in these instances is the only reasonably policy, and while it probably wouldn’t have prevented the demise of Cody’s, it might have lessened the impact.

Yet, all those affiliates would be out of a revenue stream. I would presume the same would happen across multiple aff programs. So indirectly the state is just hurting small business and hindering corporations from being based in NY. I have a feeling many affiliate business will just move out of NY state if this comes to pass. I wonder if Linkshare is a registered company in NY state? Why on earth would any internet business then want to be a NY registered company?

THIS IS NOT A SALES TAX. IT IS A “USE” TAX. A sales tax = applies to commerce that takes place within the state. A use tax = applies to goods of commerce brought into the state by out-of-state transactions.

The Supreme Court, in National Bellas Hess and Quill, ruled that STATES MAY IMPOSE USE TAXES, exactly like the use tax that NY is attempting to impose on Amazon. IT’S COMPLETELY LEGAL under the US Constitution. The reasoning: to internalize the costs of interstate commerce and prevent small states with low tax burdens (due to small populations and thus small needs) from monopolizing shipping-based businesses.

CITIES AND COUNTIES MAY NOT IMPOSE USE TAXES. So stop whining about all that local tax BS. States have a Constitutionally-recognized power to pass use taxes. Cities and counties do not. (The sales tax is a separate power that flows from the state.)

It’s not hard to impose a use tax. MOST STATES DO NOT HAVE USE TAXES.