[dragonwriter]

> It was always perfectly legal to travel to another state to buy something expensive and bring it back home.

It was legal to do that. If it was purchased out of state with the intent of bringing it back home, then (assuming the home state was California) California use taxes were always owed on it. Other states with sales taxes also tend to have similarly-structured use taxes with rates similar to the sales tax rates.

They were legally avoiding sales taxes, but also illegally evading use taxes, and, moreover, there is very little reason for the former if you aren't also doing the latter, unless you just have some moral objection to your taxes being taken at the point of sale and the paperwork and remittance to the government being done by the retailer instead of being a burden you deal with yourself.

[int_19h]

It was the same for WA, so you're right, this was always (illegal) tax evasion, not mere avoidance.

AFAIK it's not that Oregon changed anything, either. It's that Washington passed additional laws that require out-of-state merchants to collect the tax when selling to customers in WA, and said out-of-state merchants complied.

[lotsofpulp]

Washington did not pass additional laws. It was the Supreme Court's South Dakota v Wayfair ruling:

https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/17pdf/17-494_j4el.pdf

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/South_Dakota_v._Wayfair,_Inc.

Prior to this ruling, if you were a merchant in state A and you mailed something to someone in State B, you were not considered to have an economic nexus in state B, and hence state B had no jurisdiction over you to enforce sales tax collection.

Previous definitions of economic nexus involved having physical buildings or employees operating within a jurisdiction's boundaries.

South Dakota v Wayfair said that mailing something to a customer established economic nexus in the customer's jurisdiction, hence the merchant now has to register as a business in the customer's jurisdiction and collect applicable sales taxes and follow all the laws of that jurisdiction.

The whole ruling is weird though, because the justification came down to it's messing up the order of things, and since Congress can't be bothered to fix it with legislation, the Courts have to make up stuff to prolong the status quo.

[VWWHFSfQ]

I think the point was that interstate data sharing closed the loophole on evading use-taxes. Now states report to each other about large purchases. It's no longer possible to buy a car or tractor in Oregon and never report the unpaid sales tax back to Washington or California. They will know.

[dragonwriter]

I was addressing the debate that that prompted over whether the situation before that was tax evasion or mere tax avoidance, but yes, the point about interstate data sharing is what that tangent spun off from several posts upthread.