[wrenky]

Not quite- Sales tax from sales by customers in California is being located to Cupertino. So if a customer in Fresno bought an iphone, that tax is allocated to Cupertino. Other states assess tax differently.

After that fresno customer buys an iphone and pays the tax to Cupertino, Cupertino gives apple 35% of that tax back effectively lowering their sales tax rate.

[NovemberWhiskey]

I thought this worked like a stack? i.e. California gets x%, Santa Clara County gets y% and Cupertino gets z% ...

[dhosek]

Yes, but not quite: This is actually about the California x%. When you pay sales tax, there is a state/county/municipal tax that gets paid to the state, the county and the municipality where the customer is located. Municipal or county taxes may be zero or even, in rare occasions negative.¹

Then, the state portion has a fraction that gets allocated to a municipality (thanks to Prop 13, a lot of local funding has been shifted to getting granted from the state), which is generally going to be the municipality where the business is located.

These distinctions generally only come up for online transactions and some high-cost durable goods like automobiles (which is why there’s no benefit to buying your car in a different county—you’ll still pay the same tax).

⸻

1. Thanks to a prop 13 lawsuit, for a time in the 90s, the county tax (or was it city? I don’t remember now) for San Diego was actually -0.5% because it was judged that the county (city?) had illegally raised taxes and this was the method by which the judge determined that the taxes would be rebated.

[dragonwriter]

> I thought this worked like a stack? i.e. California gets x%, Santa Clara County gets y% and Cupertino gets z% …

To the extent that is approximately correct, the issue here is that the Apple/Cupertino deal involves Apple apparently filing false paperwork to make Cupertino rather than the actual distribution site for the particular order the bottom of the stack, and is getting kickbacks from Cupertino out of the money effectively stolen from some other jurisdiction by that false reporting.

[khuey]

The question here is if the buyer is in Fresno and Apple's warehouse is in say Tracy then which counties and cities should be able to apply their sale taxes to the transaction.