Revenue-hungry state governments are licking their chops. Stuck with declining tax collections and soaring costs for services, they’re chasing Amazon.com around the country in a series of attempts to make it collect sales taxes.
That’s led some to wonder whether this high-tech round of whack-a-mole might be the front edge of a viral political movement that spreads across the country, wiping out tax-free shopping for millions of consumers and dragging down profit margins of Amazon.com and other e-retailers.
Fat chance.
The volley of lawsuits, rhetoric from fired-up tax collectors, and Amazon’s hardball response tactics are certainly entertaining to watch from afar. But any real resolution will almost certainly come from a much more boring, slow-moving effort to get state sales taxes on a common source code, and then change the federal laws.
Here’s why:
—It’s not clear that the newly popular approaches to wringing more sales taxes from Amazon customers are legally enforceable. That means potentially long court battles, such as one under way in New York.
—Amazon has shown no real signs of giving up its fight, even if that means cutting jobs. Some politicians are already knuckling under.
—Others are already working on a comprehensive fix. It’s the realistic vehicle for national online retail taxes, an approach that Amazon has supported, and everyone knows it.
The question here is not whether Amazon and other online retailers should have to pay taxes. It’s whether they have to collect taxes for the government.
In states where a retailer doesn’t have an office, the answer is generally no. The U.S. Supreme Court said so in a 1992 case, ruling that forcing a company to navigate the thousands of different
