Legal Concerns for Catalogers ’07: Lawyers Outline Key Use-tax, Gift Card Issues

Regarding the Streamlined Sales and Use Tax Agreement, whose original goal was to simplify and make more uniform state and local sales and use taxes easier for retailers to collect, the group now has 15 member states. “Early on,” Isaacson said, “state delegates ran into disagreements among one another. Instead, the [coalition] lowered its sights and settled for a few very limited reform measures, such as some uniform definitions. The strategy of the National Governors Association will increase leverage in Congress to reward those states involved. Even with very modest reforms that the Agreement calls for, they’ve already started cheating on it, passing new taxes, not calling them sales or use-taxes. A number of states have used this as a way to increase taxes, including rounding up taxes on shipping and handling.”