Software engineers and entrepreneurs are extremely clever, numerous solutions will arise to integrate with all of the major ecommerce platforms to automate this. This won't be much of a burden on business. As long as regulations are clearly defined (unlike GDPR) the industry will deal. Uncertainty is always the biggest risk.
That depends on whether this decision gets extended to the municipal-level taxes. That's where things get really complex. The geo-boundaries on the areas where taxes are enforced aren't limited to simple city boundaries. Street number or side of the street (odd/even addresses) can matter. And taxes can vary depending not just on location, but also the items purchased. It's a nightmare scenario for internet businesses. Brick-and-mortar stores deal with this by just supporting taxation for a one specific location. If internet stores are required to support all locations, it will be a huge disadvantage.
> If internet stores are required to support all locations, it will be a huge disadvantage.
Who said anything about internet stores being required to support all locations? Nothing is stopping an e-commerce outfit from restricting sales to a particular state, or county, or city, and simplifying their tax situation considerably. And brick-and-mortar chains with multiple locations already have to deal with these rules.
I don't see the "huge disadvantage" you're talking about.
There's a huge difference between being required to support each of your locations and being required to support each of your customer's locations. Each Walmart is able to sell to nearby customers. Asking internet retailers to collect local taxes would be like requiring Walmart to get home addresses for each of their customers and collect taxes according to that address instead of the store's address.
You have no idea what you are talking about. Won’t be much burden on business? If you have physical shipping addresses, it is a bit easier, but what if you sell virtual goods/services? Billing address? But that doesn’t actually have anything to do where the person is actually buying the product. If I go to a masseuse in California but my credit card has a Texas billing address, I am still charged California taxes. So the precedent of using billing address for tax calculation is a bit ridiculous and innaccurate. What if I have a foreign billing address? So do we use IP address? My IP address routinely has me in the wrong city and sometimes wrong region. When I lived near Avignon, France, my IP would always show me as being in Corsica. Then there is VPN that could make us all in Oregon and avoid taxes completely. Oregon-as-a-Service.
Engineers are clever. Sure that might be true, but now that cleverness is going to be wasted building tax compliance solutions which aren’t even close to being “not much of a burden.”
> Engineers are clever. Sure that might be true, but now that cleverness is going to be wasted building tax compliance solutions which aren’t even close to being “not much of a burden.
Orrrrr a couple of companies will step into this problem space, solve it, and everyone will offload their tax compliance to those companies, in exactly the same way that we don't all waste 1,000,000 engineering hours on the arcana of banking and credit card networks and just offload that concern to payment gateways with nice APIs.
This is already the way it works in most of the world. HN is showing its provincialism by convincing themselves this is some kind of impossible-to-solve problem.
If the purchaser has an address in an area with taxes, you then pay it. If they do some weird VPN workaround and billing address in the Cayman Islands, then you don't pay the taxes. It's self compliance. We sent men on the moon in 1969, this isn't rocket science to calculate a tax bill.
It's really interesting to think about this. Very different types of complexity.
The smallest possible correct program implementing a tax calculator is going to be a LOT bigger than the smallest possible correct program for controlling a 60's era manned flight to the moon. The latter is more complex in other ways, of course.
Complexity can be "deep" or "wide". software for rockets is "deep and thin complexity", but calculating hyper-local minimal tax bills is extreme "wide and shallow complexity".
