Those companies also could hire accountants, which would help unemployment.

Business is HARD!

So Dean thinks it would be a picnic filling out and filing 50 sets of state sales tax forms, not to mention additional ones for municipalities? Some of these will require complete reports on a monthly basis. This may not be a problem at all for Amazon itself, but for many of the very small firms which sell specialized products on the net it truly is a nightmare. Dean does not know what he is talking about here. Sales tax on internet sales is a major problem, but "solving" it by requiring conformance to existing sales tax law is a step backwards. These laws were obviously designed for brick-and-mortar stores, not the internet. Could we have some forward-looking please?

You Want to Know What an 'Accounting Nightmare' is? -- All the local retail stores closing down because predator online sites like Amazon have an unfair market advantage.

Compared to that, everything else is pure Sweet Dreams.

Let's see. I had $1,000,000 in sales to Arizona last year -- I already knew that anyway -- and the tax rate is 7%, I owe the Department of Revenue of the State of Arizona $70,000. Type that number in, press the button on my bill-pay account, and presto, that's one state down after 10 minutes max. Multiply that by 50 states, and OK, since I have better things to do, my accountant will have to spend a few hours. OK, make it quarterly or even monthly, and yes, an hour here and an hour there, especially if your operation cannot employ the level of automation that five-year-olds find antediluvian now, pretty soon you're talking about real time.

O, the crushing burden! O, the humanity!

I'm a web developer working with mainly very small companies (fewer than 10 employees, usually one or two) to create e-commerce sites, and I can tell you from hard won personal experience that at this level it truly is an undue burden.

Take NY, where I live. The sales tax rates are calculated by the location of the buyer, and there are a great many different possibilities. And there's no simple lookup. It can't be done by ZIP code, because some of the tax jurisdictions split a single zip. The New York Department of Taxation and Finance provides an address lookup on their website, but they do not provide an API so the lookup can be done programmatically by the e-commerce site, and most of the e-commerce software available within the budgets of my clients does not provide any method to look up the tax rates, nor do these software packages even interface with services (low cost or otherwise) to provide the lookup.

So there is really no practical way for an e-commerce site which I design for most of my clients to even figure out what the correct tax rate is. Collecting it and reporting it are not the biggest issue at this level, calculating it is.

I think that any company large enough to have nexus in multiple states probably has sufficient resources to have some of these problems solved, and the burden of complicated multiple-state filing shouldn't be beyond their reach, but the very small businesses are really left out of the political calculation here entirely. It's frustrating.

So, I feel like (for once) Dean is a little off in his assessment of how easy this really is.

Why we can't just have a single-rate, national internet sales tax which is somehow apportioned to the states is beyond me.