Marketplace Fairness Act - Got My Attention

The one bit of tax loophole legislation that will never happen is the regulating the offshore tax havens that most of our perfidious politicians are waxing daily. I was just reading on CNN that Jeb Bush placed a large sum of money in one recently, pretty much negating any viable possibility that he can run in 2016 with that bit of inconvenient news.

 

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I would recommend different sites for Marketplace Fairness research.
https://www.govtrack.us/congress/bills/113/s743 (for official Senate bill)
http://emainstreet.org (for insight on bill)
http://marketplacefairnesscoalition.org/ (for regular blog updates about bill)

The one suggested above is actually a website created/maintained by a CSP (Certified Software Provider) who stands to benefit from the bill by providing the software that MFA mandates. It's a clever site, but not always accurate and motivated by self-gain.

I'd strongly recommend the MFA video series to get insights on the bill in 2 minute increments here: http://emainstreet.org/videos/

Happy reading!

 

It's an incredible amount of work. In fact, it's not legal. Court Ruling 'Quill' (and its predecessor 'Bellas Hess') requires a company to have a presence in a state in order to collect tax for that state. The issues are many, but one glaring one is that there are now over 10k tax jurisdictions (up from over 9600 last year) and tax cannot be mapped to zip codes, so it actually as to be mapped to home/shipping addresses. Each jurisdiction will have different tax exemptions/rates, and business owners would have to categorize products and prep them in new ways. Their business solutions/carts/tax software/etc. would have to be thrown out as they would have to pay thousands more to integrate a new govt tax software...that even if it worked...would require a new API for each state, and would be rendered useless if businesses don't know how to prep their data (or can't afford to) in this new way. Needless to say, just integrating software and providing support is a huge ordeal... but factor in privacy issues (online shopping history mapped to every home address in America), tax complexity, costs, and tax regulations w/o representation... MFA just isn't a reasonable requirement. (How do a state tell a company w/ no 'nexus' that they will be audited, must be subject to inquires, file monthly tax documents, etc... even though they have no representative, no vote and no presence in that state??)

 

CA has already been doing this for a few years now, and with no burden on the seller. The state collects it's due taxes at the time of purchase automatically.

 

In Michigan there is a line on my State tax form to identify and remit the use tax on out of state purchases. They provide a table based on income that I have always used to estimate the tax due Michigan. It's easy to comply and eliminate a potential audit point.

 

VAT is an acronym for "value added tax." If I buy a steel bar, I pay a relatively small tax on the purchase. If I make screws out of that bar and sell them, a higher tax is charged for that purchase, because the steel has "added value."

 

Funny how it's legal but the media will portray it as a nefarious act, and I'd be willing to bet that many of the executives of CNN also use these same/similar offshore accounts.