Where in the world are you calling from?

[Travis James]

IANAL, and I Expecially ANA Tax L, but isn't sales tax
determined by the location of the transaction? A difficult
thing to pin down, since the exchange of money for ownership
or license rights or whatnot is something of an abstraction
whose latitude and longitude are a bit fuzzy ...

I think conceptually that's true but there must be some regulation on
how those lines are drawn. In California, if I go to a lower-tax county
and buy a plasma, I pay their tax rate. I suppose, like buying on
Amazon, I should true up with the tax man at filing, but who does that.

However, when I was a boat salesman (which is practically the same as
car sales), I had to get the buyer's zip code where it would be
registered because we collected tax according to the underlying county
of the buyer.

Sales tax is obviously a PITA, and most intelligent people could
probably come up with a simplification to cover 90% of the cases. The
problem is that each of our 10% cases will probably not be the same. So
you end up with such craziness as the marshmallow tax (big ones are food
and not taxable, little ones are taxed or something like that).

The city/county/district level taxes are what lets the politicians raise
money for their favorite program with "just a little tax." We pay .1%
(.001) towards our zoo, for example.

 

[Roedy Green]

That's based on the assumption that the purpose of sales taxes is to pay
for the services which enabled the good to be sold. My understanding is
that governments basically treat sales taxes as just another way of
raising money.

Yes obviously.

Consider this scenario. Let's say you ordered 20 tonnes of recycled
toilet paper. Why should your district get the tax money when the
other district had to do all the work of providing the infrastructure
to help manufacture it, e.g. water, roads etc.?

Local taxes are supposed be be for supporting local government
expenditures.

 

[Roedy Green]

So
you end up with such craziness as the marshmallow tax (big ones are food
and not taxable, little ones are taxed or something like that).

We have a strange tax dodge here in Canada. If you buy less than 6
bakery items, they are taxed. 6 or more and they are not. What is
this for? To encourage gluttony. To discriminate against old age
pensioners living alone? It is just something the bakery lobby got
installed to encourage sales?

You'd think a tax would be designed to be ignored for trivial items
and engaged for ones big enough to be worth the bother.

 

[Roedy Green]

The location of the buyer is defined differently at law for the type of
transaction. You walk into a store, you transact at the store, and the buyer
is at the store for the transaction. The intimate involvement of cars and
boats with law and registration and licensing must have something to do with
the determination of the location to be at the home address. When a buyer
purchases over the 'net, the location is the client seat.

All my life I have lobbied politicians for simplification of the
income tax. I would say "I don't mind paying the tax, but I burns me
up to be forced to compute it, especially when it is deliberately and
obviously obfuscated (adding numbers in, then taking them away later,
standard deductions). You could compute the exact same taxes much
more simply, and further they don't have to be nearly so complex."

It is perhaps not so painful now with QuickTax, but I figured circa
1982 the government should provide a canonical QuickTax free to anyone
to compute tax more easily.

 

[Roedy Green]

You're right, it would be nice to have some kind of central directory
of this stuff so that a vendor could look up a customer's street
address (maybe) and see who is supposed to get how much. With so many
different entities forming, dissolving, changing boundaries, changing
rates, charging and removing surcharges, etc, etc, it would be a
nightmare.

If it were in a common format, a common database a vendor's computer
could look up to get the current rate, either there would have to be
formed some multi-state body to operate it, similar to an industry
association, or the federal government.

Perhaps somebody like ISO could define an international standard for
tax rate inquiries, and bit by bit states could adopt it. Your vendor
program would have to communicate with 50 different computers, but at
least they would use the same protocol.

It offends me somebody putting a scheme into practice they know CAN'T
possibly be managed. Even people desperately wanting to be in 100%
compliance with the law CAN'T be. That sort of thing is how
disrespect for law gets started.

 

[Roedy Green]

I suppose I might do a cookie or Preference to record the last choice,
but that would require signing the Applet, which scares people off.

One way to do this without signing, needing tables, or needing an IP
lookup service would be to implement a simple database on the server
to record preference by ip. Now if I could just persuade my ISP to
let me run a Server. He needs one of those round TUITS.

 

[Roedy Green]

It's actually not up to you to collect sales tax for those buyers whose
locations you cannot determine, or with whose locations you don't have
arrangements. At least for USA purchasers. It's up to the buyer to remit the
appropriate use tax. You're off the hook.

You don't have to use IP location. Have the purchase order include an averral
of location. You take their word for it.

So when the buyer asks you the sales tax, what do you say? It sounds
like you have to tell him two values, the amount he must remit to you
and the amount he must pay himself, depending on your "business
presence" in his state.

If you are a business, you don't have to collect sales taxes from
people in other states unless you have a business presence in that
state. In that case, you must collect just the state tax, not the
local tax.

I have been collecting tax rate trivial for a revision of the American
Tax program. In doing so I think I figured out why it is the way it
is. It is the notion of taxation without representation. If a
vendor's district can collect tax from a remote buyer, the buyer has
no redress to complain about the tax. He can't vote the bounders out
of office who jacked up the taxes.

I have been looking at Colorado. Some of the new districts jack their
rate way above the average. American sale tax rates are exceedingly
variable, even city by city.

 

[Roedy Green]

Another approach, still based on routes, would be to do a route trace
from the applet to one or more outside locations. Look at the names of
the intermediate hosts. ISPs often name routers geographically. The
third hop on a trace from my home to mindprod.com, for example, is

ge-1-19-ur01.bremerton.wa.seattle.comcast.net

You can figure out just from the name that I'm in Washington state,
probably near Seattle, and probably even nearer to Bremerton.

I had yet another idea how to tackle this. I just have the applet
collect IP it has talked to recently. I then periodically look these
up and build them into a table of IP->province. The idea being regular
users suddenly notice the thing has developed persistent memory of
their favoured setting. This however, still needs a server. I am
trying to avoid having to sign the applet which would scare people
off.

 

[Tom Anderson]

Yes obviously.

Consider this scenario. Let's say you ordered 20 tonnes of recycled
toilet paper. Why should your district get the tax money when the other
district had to do all the work of providing the infrastructure to help
manufacture it, e.g. water, roads etc.?

Well, my district is going to provide the drains which are going to take
it all away again, for one.

Local taxes are supposed be be for supporting local government
expenditures.

Absolutely. But a sales tax could be local to the buyer rather than the
seller. Although then you should probably call it a purchase tax.

tom

 

[Tom Anderson]

To the delight of lawyers

http://www.educationet.org/messageboard/posts/38833.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jaffa_cake

I like the final summary in the trial transcript.

There was a similar battle over teacakes recently - the little things
comprising a soft biscuit base, with a marshmallow dome on top, coated in
chocolate. The revenue said they were chocolate-covered biscuits
(taxable), and the supermarkets said they were caked (not). From 1973,
when VAT (our sales tax) was brought in, the revenue insisted on their
tax. In 1994, they changed their mind. They then owed the supermarkets 21
years of back tax. Cue another decade of legal battles.

There's a BBC article on it with a handy table of the tax status of
various biscuit/cake products:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/europe/7340101.stm

There are some striking oddities. For example, a biscuit coated in
chocolate is taxable, but one filled with chocolate (like a bourbon or BN)
is not. Shortbread topped with caramel and then chocolate, aka
millionaire's shortbread, is not taxable, but shortbread topped with only
chocolate is taxable.

tom

 

[Mark Thornton]

I wrote a pair of Applets to compute sales tax. I did some looking at
web hit stats and discovered the Canadian Tax calculator is my most
popular piece of software. It would be nice if it could
automatically default configure itself to the province/state of the
user.

I can get the country from Locale.getDefault().getCountry(), but not
the state/province.

It does not have to be 100% accurate.

It might be done with some rough IP table ranges, ideally something in
pure Java. Any ideas?

I know there are commercial IP categorising services and tables, but I
have no budget. This, like all my software is free.

I suppose I might do a cookie or Preference to record the last choice,
but that would require signing the Applet, which scares people off.

In WebStart it is possible to store small amounts of data on the client
machine without needing to sign the application. As from Java 6u10
(beta) many features of WebStart become available to applets.

Mark Thornton

 

[Roedy Green]

Can't you just save their last settings in a cookie? It's been a long
time since I looked at applets--but I thought they could save/read
cookies, or communicate with Javascript code on the page which could do
so for them. That way, when they come back, it picks up the last
province/state they used, and you no longer care about their IP.

the last time I was experimenting with that, it looked as if you had
to digitally sign the applet.

 

[Tim Slattery]

It offends me somebody putting a scheme into practice they know CAN'T
possibly be managed.

Welcome to politics! What will offend few enough legislators (and
constituencies) to get passed is not necessarily the best or even the
most practicable solution.

Even people desperately wanting to be in 100%
compliance with the law CAN'T be. That sort of thing is how
disrespect for law gets started.

No argument here.

 

[Tim Slattery]

All my life I have lobbied politicians for simplification of the
income tax.

I have completely given up hope that any kind of rationalization will
*ever* come to income taxes. Every time the subject is raised, every
lobbyist in the world descends on the legislature, looking for special
breaks for their clients. Rational policies are impossible in that
environment, it just ain't gonna happen.

 

[Martin Gregorie]

Even people desperately wanting to be in 100%
compliance with the law CAN'T be. That sort of thing is how
disrespect for law gets started.

Its also meat and drink to wannabe dictators and other pond-life
governments. Government:1 You:0 - forever.

 

[Andrew Thompson]

In WebStart it is possible to store small amounts of data on the client
machine without needing to sign the application. As from Java 6u10
(beta) many features of WebStart become available to applets.

What about applications? It is so frustrating to
have to redesign apps. from/to using the JNLP based
classes over the standard classes.

 

[Mark Thornton]

What about applications? It is so frustrating to
have to redesign apps. from/to using the JNLP based
classes over the standard classes.

This particular issue only applies to code run in a sandbox, which means
unsigned applets and webstart applications. Regrettably, persistence
in the sandbox is probably unavoidably different from the regular case.
Security is a pain.

Mark Thornton

 

[Roedy Green]

I don't know how Canadian sales taxes work, but if they are like those
in the US, then they probably distinguish between sales to consumers and
sales to businesses. Perhaps they are using a heuristic: less than 6 is
probably a sale to the consumer (taxed), whereas 6 or more is probably a
sale to a restaurant or caterer or other reseller (not taxed).

The GST (federal sales tax) is quite clever. Everybody pays the GST.
Businesses collect the GST. businesses total up their GST expenditures
for the month.

They subtract the their expenditures from the GST collected. They
remit that.

Its a clever system because everybody's records cross check everyone
else's.

In my years in business I never encountered anyone cheating on it, or
asking me to cheat.

The PST (Provincial Sales Tax) works differently. If you are a
business, you show your PST number and the vendor does not change PST.
However, it is such a hassle you would not bother except for large
purchases. Because it would be so easy to cheat, vendors presume you
are.

there are no county or city sales taxes. They get a cut of the other
two taxes.

 

[Roedy Green]

If I set a persistent cookie in it, and then quit the browser and
relaunch and go back to that site, the applet finds the cookie.

that will do. I will simply persist the last choice of state/county.

 

[Roedy Green]

The GST (federal sales tax) is quite clever. Everybody pays the GST.
Businesses collect the GST. businesses total up their GST expenditures
for the month.

I found a commercial service that for a mere $900 a year will tell me
the sales tax rate given the zip code. Good lord, that same program
for Canada could be written in 30 minutes including collecting all the
data.

Surely there is some principle that says you should be able to comply
with the law without expending $900 a year.