Sales Tax Blog

In July 2008, Washington State decided it wanted to join the Streamline Sales Tax effort (an issue we’ll cover a lot in other posts), but the big crux of what this meant to storeowners was that they wanted to move to a destination-based sales tax…meaning that the sales/use tax should be collected not based on where the storeowner’s location is, but rather where the products are delivered.

Generally speaking, this probably makes a lot of good sense for the local communities. Charging sales/use taxes based on the actual destination means that items being purchased by local people benefits the local community, not just the state. Of course, that’s just one perspective. From the storeowner’s point of view, this action is tantamount to opening Pandora’s box.

Two sides of this equation that affect storeowners – compliance and reporting. On the compliance side, clearly the storeowner is now expected to manage their sales tax information for the entire state as rates can fluctuate widely across counties, not to mention that rate changes can occur at any given point in time. So, keeping tax rate data current and properly configured is one issue. The other side of the equation is reporting. Knowing what was collected and what needs to be reported to the state is where the “rubber hits the road” so to speak. Having accurate tax reports that show what amounts were collected, from which counties/areas and for what time periods becomes a godsend.

Back in July 2008, NetBlazon received quite a few calls from Washington State storeowners in need of a solution to handle their compliance and reporting needs, which is why we decided to create the AccurateTax TaxTools product suite. Of course, it now seems that there are a great many states that are interested in getting in on this action, so we will continue to document those tax rules here and as always, we’re open to your own interpretations of these laws.