Catalogers’ Legal Challenges ’07 (and Beyond)

Beginning with our January 2008 issue, veteran direct marketing tax attorney George Isaacson will join our distinguished panel of columnists with a periodic column devoted primarily to tax issues affecting catalogers and multichannel marketers. To lay the groundwork for his column, in this issue he offers an overview of key legal issues affecting catalogers and other direct marketers. His columns next year will delve more deeply into the specific issues.
Sales & Use Tax (Nexus)
State revenue departments have stepped up their efforts to require catalog companies and Internet merchants to collect state sales and use taxes. To impose such collection obligations, state tax auditors must be able to prove that a retailer has some form of physical presence in the taxing state — what lawyers refer to as “nexus.”