[toomuchtodo]

The state with the buyer should require through law the buyer to file a transaction record with their state revenue department for use tax unless the receipt contains a transaction ID showing tax was collected by the seller (can any of us argue this is hard in today’s age of API submissions? I don’t believe so).

Buyers then prefer sellers who collect taxes for them. This forces Amazon and other marketplaces to collect the tax.

The law already requires this in aggregate (use tax from the buyer of sales tax wasn’t paid). Very similar to how you can only claim dependents if your provide their social security number. Great way to bring entities into tax payment compliance.

[ikeboy]

It's not practical for states to go after individual buyers

[toomuchtodo]

Disagree. It isn’t hard at all with automated compliance.

[ghaff]

Great. So your state ought to have a record of everything that's been shipped to you.

[toomuchtodo]

Nah, you just make voluntary compliance the preferred option.

If people and Amazon paid their damn taxes, we wouldn’t even be discussing this.

[lostapathy]

There's plenty of smaller sellers that would love to be in compliance, but due to the nature of US sales tax and how FBA works (i.e., you don't know where all your product has been stored) it's practically impossible for them to be in full compliance, so they don't even try. Sometimes better to stay off another state's radar completely than get drug into a spat over partial compliance.

[toomuchtodo]

Could sellers not charge tax on all purchases for the product destination regardless of FBA sourcing?

[icebraining]

Right, but they don't, so what exactly are you proposing? It's frankly not clear to me.

[toomuchtodo]

I’m proposing using legislation to fix the problem.