On Fri, 11 Mar 2005, Alma J Wetzker wrote:
AFAIK, you are not required to collect taxes unless you have a "presence" in the state. That is usually interpreted to mean some sort of "brick and mortar" facility. Once you start collecting taxes for a government entity, you are then subject to periodic audits, not just state, but municipality. To the best of my knowledge, there is no tax package available today that can correctly calculate tax for every address in the country. These suggestions for new taxes are simply unworkable with the present tax situation.
That's not accurate at all. There are no 'retail' tax packages that can do this. There are alot of 'enterprise' software packages that can, and do. Oracle, amongst others, sells software capable of caclulating taxes (sales, income, etc) for all US locations (state & local).
Do they now work? They were 90% or a hair better a few years back, but the problems with the last bit were institutional rather than technical. They also depend on every good or service sold being coded correctly, which means differently for different counties. I know there are professional packages that claim to get it all right, I have evaluated some of them, they still miss some pieces here an there, AFAIK.
Disclaimer: When I was doing taxes, we had a "presence" in every state and in many counties within some states. Taxes varied widely. Sometimes an item was taxed as a service, sometimes as a good. Sometimes the tax depended on if it was done at our facility or at the customer site. The tax differed if it was delivered or picked up. Some customer facilities were in two taxing districts. One of our facilities had a county line through the center. When we were regional, I wrote and maintained the tax package, and got it mostly right. When we were bought, and went national, we went through several "professional" tax packages, and they were not as close as the smaller one I wrote. Part of that was size, part of it was the inventory items were coded differently on the new system, and part was just the size of the job.
-- Alma _______________________________________________ [email protected] Unsub/Pause/Etc : http://mail.linux-sxs.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/general
