Gordon Lugauer of Board Game Barrister in Milwaukee, Wisconsin read Mike Drake's  response (see "Mike Drake on Internet Sales Tax") to Scott Thorne's column regarding misconceptions about online retailers and sales tax (see "Rolling for Initiative--Death and Taxes (Well, Taxes Anyway)") and had this to say.
 
I have a quick response to Mike Drake's commentary:
 
Just to clarify that Sales Tax is a tax on consumption, levied on the consumer by the governing jurisdiction where that consumer is physically present.  The merchant is acting as a mere agent of the taxing authority when it collects tax on the consumption (under compulsion by the taxing authority in most cases, granted).  The fact that a taxing authority cannot compel some merchants to act as an agent for the taxing authority (thanks to the Supreme Court's pre-Internet 1992 Quill v. North Dakota) does not mean that the consumer is not liable to pay the tax.  They most certainly are.  The consumer just must take the inconvenient path of filing a separate tax return and remitting the tax themselves.  As with most taxes, if they are inconvenient or cumbersome, or largely unknown, they are less likely to be paid.  Or, less-charitably, they are more likely to be dodged, even if unwittingly.  So, let's be clear, when a purchase is made online, the one making the purchase owes the tax, period.  If the online merchant doesn't want to help their customer follow the law, the Supreme Court says that the merchant doesn't have to.  Ok.  But, two decades on, we now have a nation of (mostly unintentional) tax cheats.
 
Yes, an internet sales tax that attempts to account for all the minutia of every permutation of every taxing authority will be complex.  But this is merely a large set of conditions to apply to any given sale-- a lot of work, yes; but not so hideously complex as to be worthy of the doom and gloom you seem to attribute to it.  Just a good chunk of work for a capable team of programmers.  Moreover, from a practical perspective, it is foreseeable that most taxing authorities would gladly create a sort of streamlined, even standardized, reporting and remittance procedure to facilitate the collection of sales tax on internet purchases.  Collecting most of the tax easily is the win by far.
 
Let's help ourselves stop being a nation of unintentional tax cheats.  We made the purchase, let's pay the tax, and let's make it easy to do the right thing.  "We bought the stuff so we must pay, pass the Internet Sales Tax today!"
 
Thankfully, penning slogans is not my forte, so I'll leave you with that.
 
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