I came across this article over the weekend about the renewed effort in Congress to collect online sales tax:
http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,516988,00.html
While a controversial subject in general, one statement in the article in particular caught my attention:
"The sheer complexity of sales-tax-collection in the U.S. — it's estimated there are about 7,000 different states, counties, municipalities and other governmental agencies that collect it — has made it nearly impossible to collect taxes from online retailers."
Whoever wrote the article obviously wasn't aware of StrikeIron's sales tax calculation Web services API's. By simply providing the shipping address, a simple XML call calculates the appropriate sales tax amounts for the various jurisdictions of the ship-to address. They can be integrated into e-commerce Web sites, shopping cart applications, and just about anything else that can consume a SOAP or REST-based Web service. They can easily be incorporated with credit card systems, Pay Pal, Amazon FPS, Google Checkout, and many other online e-commerce systems.
StrikeIron offers several of these sales tax rate services on a subscription basis, from basic sales tax rates for US & Canada that are useful in some scenarios, to comprehensive sales tax rate data services that handle fine granularity of tax jurisdictions, product-dependent tax rates, tax holidays, and more.
So while there may be a whole host of other reasons while there shouldn't be online sales tax, "sheer complexity" isn't one of them.
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