Washington state sales tax changes coming

[teaist]

Please bear with me as this is my first posting on any forum and I might be doing something completely wrong by mistake. I have a mailorder/internet business in Washington state. Up until this coming July 1st, Washington based businesses calculated sales tax based on the location of the business. Beginning July 1st, Washington businesses that ship or deliver to WA addresses will have to calculate the sales tax for the delivery site. This would not be such a big deal but we have sales tax here that is calculated not just by county, or zipcode or even by town/city, but also has to be calculated for the RTA (Regional Transit Authority) which I understand can be different from street to street and even house number to house number. This is the notice that I received from the Dept of Rev regarding this change:

Currently, Washington retailers collect local sales tax based ont he jurisdiction from which a product is shipped or delivered. Effective July 1,2008, retailers will need to collect local sales tax based on the destination of the shipment or delivery. This only affects businesses that ship or deliver their merchandise to locations in WA state.

Components making up the tax rate:

Retailers collect the combined state and local retail sales tax from their customers. The state retail sales tax rate is 6.5%. Local retail sales tax rates range from 0.5 to 2.4%.

Other taxes that can add to the sales tax are the REgional Transit Authority (RTA) tax of 0.4% collected on sales in parts of King, Pierce and Snohomish counties.

(It is my understanding that you can actually have or not have a RTA tax even on the same street! )

Have any WA state Zen Cart users come up with a solution to this problem? Am I going to have to ping the WA Dept of Revenue site's tax code checker for each and every WA state sale I make, before I can give the customer a total to charge their credit card?

I'm just a simple tea merchant.... I know there are serious computer folks out there that must have given this some thought.... July 1st is coming up fast.

Thank you,
Bonnie

[nwsp]

Bonnie,

Same boat here. I am planning on attending a Destination Based sales tax workshop here is Spokane on Tues. (4-29) afternoon. They won't be able to help me as far as how to deal with making zen cart work under this new structure, but i am hoping to find out if there are any extensions or waivers if zen-cart or other shopping carts are not capable of implementing the tax structure they now want us to work with.

Hopefully there is a way of implementing with zen-cart or a waiver, i don't want to have to start all over again with a new e commerce system, especially since this one is so cheap to run (free - except for hosting)

If I find out anything of interest tomorrow I will post it here.

www.thegardenpet.com

Robert

[sadie]

I am so sick of Washington State trying to get every dollar out of people, and businesses. There is no way that an internet merchant can implement this new policy.

My sales in Washington are minimal, so, I may stop shipping within my own state. Now, how does that look to have to put on my site that I do not even ship to my home state? But, I do not have the time nor the want for all of this paperwork.

If anyone goes to a seminar and there is some sort of waiver for small businesses, please post it and/or email me.

Sadie

[nwsp]

Well I went to this workshop today. What a joke. The people charged with implementing this are so confused on how to do it, and basically what I walked away from this workshop was that I will no longer sell to customers in Washington State, not even phone orders. While the revenue from Washington state sales for me are only around 5% of my total U.S. sales. When you add up all the small businesses that are going to suspend their phone, catalog, and internet sales, Washington State will be out a good chuck of revenue. But also from the workshop I heard that Washington state could care less about the small companies that bring in 49% of the revenue and only care about the top 1000 large business that bring in the 51% of revenue. Then there was the part about that this is what they want to do nationally in the next few years. So possibly in the next few years I will have to accommodate every single tax district in the U.S. Now I am the ONLY person in our company that works on this project that my boss asked if I could do. I have no formal IT training; I've managed to fumble my way around and accomplish a good amount and am very proud of that. I know my technical limitations and I know the limitations of our hardware that run our Point of Sale (POS) system (cash register + database) and the limitations of Zen cart and most other out of the box e-commerce-shopping cart systems. The owner of our company is not going to want to or have the money to update the POS System, The owner wants to sell online as cheaply as possible, hence Zen-cart (free), I don’t have the money to send myself to school to learn the skills I would need to code a commerce system to handle what Washington state wishes, my boss is not going to pay for it either. A more experienced IT person would not accept the pay that I have accepted to do this project for my boss. So basically after National implementation of this way of taxing I figure I am out of a job since it won't be worth the hassle to continue with sales outside of selling locally, and no large companies will hire me in an IT department or internet dept since I have no formal skills (degree or college education). I feel like Washington state just st on me, plus mad at myself for not getting a better education when the opportunity was there. I am not writing this to have anyone feel sorry for me, but as an expression as what I am imagining other people in this same boat may be feeling, and to express how bad Washington state has screwed up on this decision. I am not a very happy person about living and working in Washington State today.

[nwsp]

Mad at the end there I forgot to post some info I got from the workshop:

This is info they put up on an overhead for more info on how to deal with this implementation or contacts that could help with this implementation:

Good luck to all of you in dealing with this.

website:

http://dor.wa.gov/Content/FindTaxesA...d/default.aspx

phone:

1800-647-7706

email:

[email protected]

written ruling:

Dept of Revenue
Taxpayer Services
P.O. Box 47478
Olympia, WA. 98504-7478