High Court: Online shoppers can be forced to pay sales tax
For anyone but the very largest retailers (think: Walmart, Amazon), this has the potential to unleash an absolutely ruinous storm of neverending tax paperwork on us from literally every state (and possibly county) in the country–all of which would likely require their own filing processes, tax rates, rules, and potentially auditing facilities.
We got a tiny taste of this when we used to exhibit at the Chicago Comic-Con, where our (then California-based) company had to apply for an Illinois sales permit each year and do separate sales tax and use filings (as well as deal with the inevitable bureaucratic foul-ups and notices) just for the purpose of being able to sell during a 3-day comic book show. Imagine every small company with an internet presence having to do this every quarter for virtually every tax jurisdiction in the country.
This is bad news for small businesses (meaning anyone without hundreds of millions in annual revenues). I can’t wait to see what inventive solutions the government will now cook up to make the problem even worse…