Streamlined Sales Tax Project

The United States Supreme Court has overruled state efforts to collect sales tax from internet businesses because of the burden involved. The Streamlined Sales Tax project aims to fix that.

In cases like Bellas v. Illinois and Quill Corp. v. North Dakota, the United States Supreme Court has repeatedly put an end to the efforts of states to collect sales tax from internet sites that sell products to people in their state. The primary reason for this is the incredible burden it places on the websites. The burden would include:

• tracking your sales for customers in fifty states,
• figuring out the sales tax rates for each state,
• creating a program with each rate for each state,
• collecting and partitioning the sales tax for each transaction,
• figuring out how to file returns for each state,
• preparing the returns for each state,
• filing and paying the tax for each state.

As if that wasn’t bad enough, now you have to go through and break out the sales tax and use tax for each county, city and town jurisdiction. At last count, there were over 11,000 different ones. That’s a lot of tax returns!

The states have finally stopped trying to convince the Supreme Court to reverse itself. Now they are trying to come up with a solution to the burden issue. The Streamlined Sales Tax Project is the most popular option at the moment. As economic times get tougher, more and more states are giving serious thought to joining it.

The Streamlined Sales Tax Project was started in 2000. As the name suggests, the goal is to create a simplified and uniform tax filing basis for the sales tax on internet sales. So far, 21 states have amended their laws in accordance with the Project.

The interesting thing about the project is what it is not – a success. In nine years, it has only been able to get 21 states on board. That can only be looked at as a brutal failure. The “SSTP” must have all of the states on board before it can hope for the Supreme Court to reverse itself. It looks like that event is going to be a very long way off. 

source : http://www.businesstaxrecovery.com/