Tax News

On March 11, 2024, Delegate David Moon (D) introduced H.B. 1515 to the House Ways and Means Committee of the Maryland General Assembly, through which he proposed to broadly expand the sales tax base to cover many services, while reducing the sales tax rate from 6% to 5%.  Delegate Moon proposed that expanding the ...

2022 is expected to bring heightened enforcement and increased sales tax audit activity for remote sellers.  Charles Maniace, a vice president at the tax software firm Sovos, states that “States are now truly ready to [start] being fairly aggressive in their enforcement against existing online sellers.”  [Forbes, Sales Taxes in 2022 – Issues to Watch for ...

As 2021 comes to an end, lets recap a few important sales tax changes and offer insight into what taxpayers can expect for 2022:

  • Economic Nexus – As of July 2021, two states, Florida and Kansas, have sales tax economic nexus. While both measures impose a safe harbor threshold of $100,000 in annual sales, below ...

The Multistate Tax Commission (MTC) has just announced a special tax amnesty program for unregistered online marketplace sellers that have established nexus and historical exposure as a result of storing inventory in third-party fulfillment centers that facilitate retail sales into the state (e.g., Amazon FBA program). Under the program, eligible taxpayers may obtain amnesty ...

U.S. Supreme Court Declines to Review Florida Sales Tax Imposed on Out of State Inventory Delivered to Out of State Customers

In yet another blow for taxpayers, the U.S. Supreme Court has denied a taxpayer's request to review the Florida Supreme Court's decision upholding Florida sales and use tax on Internet ...

With New Years Day comes New Years Resolutions, some of which we keep, some of which we don’t, and some of which we fail to make because we aren’t even aware that one is needed. The same holds true for your business. Often times, “We Don’t Know What We Don’t Know ...

A number of sales tax decisions in Tennessee, Indiana and Illinois serve to remind us all of the uncertainty involving cloud computing transactions, and the importance to seek guidance from tax practitioners regarding your specific facts. While each taxpayers’ facts involved the access to and/or provision of cloud-based services, the transactions for each were ...

In a decision involving the true object, or “essence of the transaction” test, the Texas court of appeals upheld the trial court’s decision in favor of the taxpayer refund claim for sales tax assessed on the provision of bill pay services. In Hegar v. CheckFree Services Corporation, NO. 14-15-00027-CV (Tex. Ct. App., April 19 ...

Ohio is the most recent of states to have enacted a click-through nexus provision. To date, 24 other states have adopted (by statute or otherwise) some form of either an affiliate nexus or a click-through nexus provision.

Under an affiliate nexus provision, a rebuttable presumption of nexus is typically established for an out-of-state seller that ...

Effective January 1, 2015, out-of-state retailers are once again presumed to have sales tax nexus in Illinois if they satisfy the following criteria:

• the out-of-state retailer has a contract with a person in Illinois;
• under the contract, the person in Illinois refers potential customers to the retailer and the retailer pays to the person in ...

Net neutrality is the principle that Internet service providers and governments should treat all data on the Internet equally, not discriminating or charging differentially by user, content, site, platform, application, type of attached equipment, or mode of communication. There has been extensive debate about whether "Net neutrality" should be required by law. Proponents of "Net ...

As states continue to wrestle to define tax policy for the services that comprise the expanding world of cloud computing, South Carolina has again asserted its expansive approach for taxing anything that resembles communications services, including charges for Software As a Service (SAaS) or Platform As a Service (PAaS). [Private Letter Ruling #14-4, South Carolina ...

Telematics services, or the "Internet of Things", require Internet access and Internet related services in order to be provided. The Internet Tax Freedom Act dictates that in most instances, "Internet access" shall be exempt from sales tax. It remains to be seen how states will define telematics and seek to apply existing or new sales ...

In two recent rulings, Virginia Ruling of the Commissioner PD 14-130 and 14-131 , the Virginia Commissioner ruled that Internet activation and Internet reactivation fees are not exempt under the Internet Tax Freedom Act. Rather they are subject to Virginia's communications sales tax. In Bloomberg BNA's 9/5 /14 Sales Tax Slice blog posting ...

Sometimes my job can be quite difficult. I don’t enjoy telling the client that they have nexus, and/or that they have sales tax exposure in a state that they should address as soon as possible. Trust me, I would much rather share the news with a client that everything they are doing is ...

On March 24, 2014, Maryland’s highest court, the Court of Appeals, upheld a finding of nexus against two Delaware affiliates of W.L. Gore & Associates, Ltd. (Gore), on the premise that the affiliates lacked any economic substance [ Gore Enterprise Holdings, Inc. v. Comptroller of the Treasury, Md. Ct. App., No 36 (March 24, 2014 ...

A recent Massachusetts letter ruling refines its definition of cloud computing, a rapidly evolving computer medium that includes, among other things, the Internet provision of Software As a Service (SAaS), Infrastructure As a Service (IAaS), and Platforms As a Service (PAaS). SAaS - the most common form of cloud computing – involves the provision of access to ...