Tuesday, September 15, 2009
New York's "Amazon Tax"
The Tax Foundation has joined Amazon in the fight against New York compelling Amazon.com to collect sales taxes on its business done within the state even though it does not maintain a physical presence there. The brief itself is here and a summary of it is here. To the law folk out there-- since this involves a company in one state being ordered to collect in other, wouldn't this seem to default to the Supreme Court? Or is it not interstate commerce, per se, since it deals with sales only in New York and the fact that Amazon is in another location is beside the point? Perhaps I'm confusing issues. In any case, this figures to have quite a precedent for online commerce.
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2 comments:
This is an interstate commerce issue which is why there really hasn't been any clear cut answer on this yet. The whole concept of what it means to be "doing business in a state" is really murky and this is going to eventually have to be settled on a national level. Also, the interesting thing will be if they will be able to collect "back taxes" for sales that happened before they do whatever they do to try to enforce taxes against Amazon.
Sonofabitch, I thought my amazon bill seemed higher when I gave them a NY state address.
Just when I thought I had escaped Taxachusetts...
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