hal weiner nppa

;}.

PeterBergh

Actually, robbery -- the taking of property with a threat of violence.

Blurry

I'm not sure what the law is in Iowa but I do know that after Amazon opened an office here we now pay taxes no matter what state they ship it from.

LWW Loc: Banana Republic of America

Sorry, but that’s a bridge too far.

Shutterbug1697 Loc: Northeast

Each State has a set Sales Tax rate (There are 5 out of the 50 states that don't charge any Sales Tax; Alaska, Delaware, Montana, New Hampshire, and Oregon), then within the state, some Counties or Parishes add a Sales Tax, and then the local towns or cities can add a Sales Tax. California and Louisiana are relatively high Sales Tax states because of the multiple layers of taxes that are added.

For years, the on-line retailers didn't charge any Sales Tax on shipments to states where they didn't have a "Presence". Recently, changes in tax laws have been made, and some States are now making it the responsibility of the shipper to either collect Sales Tax, or notify states when shipments have been made to states that require recipients to pay use or Sales Tax on products that they have ordered from out of state suppliers.

So, now it's a buyer beware situation. If you live in a Sales Tax State, you better be putting away the Sales Tax amounts for each online purchase, or you could be in for a huge surprise come Tax Time next year.

chrissybabe Loc: New Zealand

Every now and again you read about various countries that have really high level of bureaucracy and you wonder at the level of muddied official thinking that has gone into deciding that such a system has got something good going for it. Often you think that the only reason why something so bizarre can happen is because it can ie the population "lets" it. You Americans have just moved to the stop of the list for idiocy in how to make life difficult for yourselves. If you let this continue America will never be "great" again. It is time for the United States to become "United" again and work out a system that has a more rational base for taxation. In your effort to have "free speech" and the "right to chose" you have created a monster system that will prevent you from ever becoming the nation you could be.
You will now become a nation of tax cheats all-be-it inadvertent ones. This system of taxing has so many places now where it can fail despite your best intentions that it has become unmanageable and unwieldy and makes felons of you all.

VAC Loc: Akron, OH

I order from a company that collects sales tax on all items shipped no matter the jurisdiction. Their system easily tracks the tax.

pendennis

The U.S. is a nation made up of 50 individual states, bound by a written constitution. We're only united in some instances, disjointed and independent in others. We, for the most part, are free to determine our life choices. We also, by and large, obey tax laws, albeit by coercion in some instances, and entirely voluntarily in others. People who own their homes without a mortgage, voluntarily pay property taxes every year, and at a very high rate of compliance.

Sales taxes, rather than have individuals file individual returns, use retailers as central collection points, much more effective. The question of compliance has been an open issue for years, and our U.S. Supreme Court will probably address the compliance across states in the near future.

The several states have great political freedom. We decide who our representatives are at every political level, and we seldom see eye-to-eye on a host of issues, taxation being high on the list of push button issues. As has been mentioned in previous posts, political animals gain power by staying in office and promising favors and privileges to those who vote for them. By the way, this is not just a way of politics in the U.S., nor is it new. The Greeks, Persians, Romans, French, British, and many others all use the same system of spoils for political gain. It's been going on for thousands of years, so there's nothing new about political corruption.

If you're English, you have no guarantee of individual rights, save those allowed by Parliament. In fact democracy is merely mob rule, which never protects the rights of the minority. The moment something doesn't suit a vocal group, you can the existing government structure. Our protection of property, privacy, due process, free speech, among other rights are not only innate, but they're further enumerated in our Constitution. In recent years, your House of Commons gutted the power of the House of Lords. Try doing that here, and there would be a literal uprising. We put ourselves in front of the rest of the world, for good or bad, and I wouldn't trade it for any other form of government.

Yes, we have individuals who don't completely abide by tax laws; no country has 100% compliance with its tax laws. We have laws in place for those instances, and it's up to the government unit to collect and/or punish those who don't comply. Tax laws are passed knowing there will be a certain amount of noncompliance. And only the most egregious will become felons. In fact, tax compliance is mostly a civil, not criminal matter in the U.S, and we have an amazingly high level of compliance with our tax laws at all levels of government.

You're observing, in this thread, a very small microcosm of tax (non)compliance. Don't confuse this discussion with the overall compliance of American citizens.

chrissybabe Loc: New Zealand

"your House of Commons" doesn't exist for me. I come from New Zealand and we don't have a House of Commons.
I take your point about you being a nation comprised of 50 individual states. However I just wish you were a bit more united than you are now. The situation where a doctors prescription can be legal in one state but you step two paces to the left (into another state) and it is not legal beggars believe. If you only had a single sales tax rate and it was the same all over then you wouldn't have the situation of having to collect receipts from up to 3 different sources. Life has enough hassles without silly issues like this.
Now I am not affected in any way by your sales tax collection issues so you may well ask why am I even bothering ? Well I just hate seeing needless bureaucracy persisting when I know that we, as the human race, could do so much better. We have enough intelligence that we should be above this type of stupidity. We have learnt nothing from history particularly the Greeks, Persians, Romans, French, British, and many others and are still using the same systems of spoils for political gain. About the only piece of history that we have learnt from is that we won't learn anything from it. If your US Supreme Court does address compliance sales tax compliance then your lives will become just a little less complicated. NZ has the same issue with collecting external tax (from outside the country) as the US.
In NZ the choices are either persuading 500,000,000 world wide companies to collect the tax on their behalf or opening every single parcel and letter coming into the international postal centres to make sure its contents have been declared correctly. Neither will happen because you can see the issues when the other 200 odd countries try and do the same. History tells us that we will muddle through with patch after patch until it is so bad the whole system will collapse.

bkyser Loc: Fly over country in Indiana

Just throwing this out there, but you mentioned "Mike's Camera" getting to know you on a first name basis. As someone who is saddened by the loss of my local camera shop, and HAS to order online, I'm kind of glad that you are now shopping local.

Not sure I mind if any company I do business with is doing what they need to do to stay legal. I know some of my clients balk at me charging sales tax on prints, but it's the law, and I do it.....and pay the taxes to the state. I'm guessing B&H wants to stay in business and out of trouble with the IRS as well.

Woodworm65 Loc: Lombard, IL

Hasn't this poor horse been whipped to bloody death already?

pendennis

We're united when we need to be, and not until then.

I hope you can see the futility of trying to get even a fraction of .5 billion companies to do tax collections for New Zealand!

A country, in order to preserve its particular cultures, must be able to maintain its sovereignty. If that means that a country shipping to New Zealand drops the cargo at the port of entry, and New Zealand has to worry about what's in the container, its value, and the appropriate tax, then the openness of trade suffers; prices go up, and the consumer pays more.

There has to be a level of trust established between trader nations. Do we trust a New Zealand company to accurately list the cargo on the manifest? If we're to maintain a good trade relationship, then we do. Do we perform spot checks to insure compliance? Yes.

I frequently purchase used camera goods from dealers in Japan. I've yet to see a single charge from U.S. Customs for import duties on the equipment (yes, there are import duties on used photo gear). Do I report my purchases to Michigan? Yes. It's just part of doing business internationally.

LWW Loc: Banana Republic of America

As the great American poet Charles Edward Daniels said:

From The Sound up in Long Island
Out to San Francisco Bay
And everthing that's in between them
Is our own

And we may have done a little bit
Of fightin' amongst ourselves
But you outside people best leave us
alone

'Cause we'll all stick together
And you can take that to the bank
That's the cowboys and the hippies
And the rebels and and the yanks

You just go and lay your hand
On a Pittsburgh Steelers' fan
And I think you're gonna finally
understand

Tom G Loc: Atlanta, GA

A good example of making a big hill out of little sand.

Duderino

People in here keep pointing fingers, fussing about tax regimes and politics and whatnot. Fine. But the fingers should mostly be pointed at B&H.

I bought an inexpensive item from them in September 2017. Months later, got a letter saying that they didn't charge me sales tax, and had reported that fact to Colorado, and that I owed Colorado some tax. I currently live in a state that doesn't even have sales tax, and it's not usually on my mind.

B&H was outright deceptive here. When I buy something online, I mostly look at the final price, and expect big businesses to properly handle all the details of taxation. B&H had the best price on the item, so I bought it from them. They didn't charge me tax, so as to be more competitive with Amazon. I honestly usually don't look at taxes or shipping costs, just the bottom line. Fine, I assume they know what they're doing. I then get this letter, telling me they've reported me to Colorado for a few dollars of tax...

This pi**es me off severely. B&H fooled me into buying something from them, using a deceptively low price. If they'd told me that to save this few dollars that they were going to report me to Colorado, that I would have to formally file some form with Colorado to pay this small tax, that I would have to spend hours on the internet trying to actually understand what happened, geez, you think I would have bought this product from them?

They should have been up front and honest, and charged me the tax to begin with. I might have still bought from them, because I've always liked them. But this Colorado law apparently took effect in July, and B&H decided to keep fooling people with deceptively low prices and not charging sales tax through at least September.

It makes me angry that B&H has now cost me half a day of my life, so that they could deceive me into a sale. The cost to me is much higher than the few dollars. If they failed to charge me tax properly, then they should eat it and do better in the future. Eff B&H.