It’ been said that the only two things we can depend on in life are death and taxes. Perhaps a sobering thought, but no less a true one. After all, we pay taxes on virtually everything we consume and thanks to a recent vote in the Supreme Court, one more taxed element has been added to the list – sales tax on online transactions.
In times past, non-physical vendors were limited as to how they applied tax. Essentially, unless a company had a physical presence they could not charge a sales tax. This original ruling was made more than 20 years ago, long before ecommerce was imagined. The ruling was passed with the belief that doing otherwise would place an undue burden on interstate commerce, thus being unconstitutional. At the time of the original decision, it was determined that states were losing between $694 million and $3 billion annually. However, as e-commerce has grown and online shopping has become more prevalent, those numbers have grown, to the tune of $8 billion and $33 billion per year. A much larger loss of revenue for states.
