Internet’s Days As Tax-Free Sales Venue Are Numbered - BaltimoreSun.Com

Internet’s Days As Tax-Free Sales Venue Are Numbered - BaltimoreSun.Com

Jay Hancock, The Baltimore Sun

The Internet tax collectors are coming! The Internet tax collectors are coming! We can see the proverbial whites of their computer monitor-fixated eyes!

No, this is not a writing sample authored by Paul Revere, storming at midnight through the streets of Boston alerting denizens to the arrival of British troops.

This, of course, is a posting derived to illustrate the potentially severe repercussions of Internet taxation policies which will transform the manner in which we complete commercial transactions online in the future.

On Oct. 1 a dozen states will bypass Congress and launch a coordinated sales-tax collection regime aimed at shoppers buying goods across state lines on the Internet or in catalogs.

The fact that online vendors such as Amazon, states such as Maryland and Congress itself have balked at the initiative, called the Streamlined Sales Tax Project, should not obscure the central reality. The Internet’s days as a rootin’, tootin’, libertarian tax haven, a virtual Cayman Islands in a modem, are coming to an end. It’s open tax season on Internet customers.

Many Internet sellers are already dinging out-of-state customers for sales taxes after knuckling to litigation and other pressure.

“Over the past couple of years, something like 50 or 60 retailers have already started doing this,” says Joseph R. Crosby, legislative director for the Council on State Taxation, a big business lobby. “Many of them have decided it’s not worth the legal uncertainty, and they’ve just decided to go ahead and collect it.”

20 August, 2005 |

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