New York Sales Tax

[jhauser42]

Hi all,
New user here. I am sure this has been discussed before, but I cannot find it. In New York every county has a different sales tax rate and I need to charge tax based on where the item is being shipped to. Is there a module for this, and if not, how can I go about setting this up?


Thanks,
Joe

[chez]

Joe,
I think if you check with NY State, they will tell you that you need to collect tax based on where the sale takes place from, not the destination. Your home county rate should be what you charge.

[jhauser42]

According to: http://www.tax.state.ny.us/pdf/publi...pub750_804.pdf
page 20

"The point of delivery determines the combined rate to be collected on a sale."

This tells me that I have to collect the sales tax on the delivery point, not the point of sale.

Joe

[chez]

That section refers to the sale being consumated in NYS or outside of NY. If you send goods or services within NY, you have to collect the tax for your county. Do you have the Tax forms completed yet? It will explain it for you on the forms. You can also call the 800#. They are very helpful. If you had a storefront, your taxes are based on where you make your sales from. When you pay the state sales tax, they don't request any info on where the sales took place. You should probably call them to set your mind at ease.

[bobdog]

Yes I agree with Chez. The tax collected is the sales tax at the point of sale (your county)

Having to collect tax from the buyer's county is unreasonable, and could never be enforced.

[ryoken99]

i just got of the phone with a representative of NYS Tax dept
• Sales Tax Information Center 1-800-698-2909

He said
"Sales tax in NY is based upon where the consumer takes posession of the item
If you are shipping outside NY then NY sales tax does not apply.
If you are shipping with in NY state then tax applies depending on the county it was shipped to."

This makes everything that more complicated.

[Paul Robinson]

Yes I agree with Chez. The tax collected is the sales tax at the point of sale (your county)

Having to collect tax from the buyer's county is unreasonable, and could never be enforced.

Roughly twenty years ago, I had a sales tax permit in California. Since I usually generated less than $50 of tax per year I was downgraded from monthly to quarterly filing and then to yearly filing. And on the tax return form, for all intrastate sales you were required to apportion to each county the amount of each sale made to a buyer for whom the product was delivered or shipped to another point within the state. If you deliver at your store (i.e. the customer walks out with the item) then you collect tax for your local county. If you ship elsewhere in California outside your county, you're required to collect the collect tax for that region and apportion sales to that county (because some counties have higher tax rates than others, e.g. Los Angeles doesn't have a Contra Costa County Transit District tax.)

So it's not unreasonable, and the Franchise Tax Board could and did expect you to collect tax for the buyer's county, and that was decades ago before computers were commonly available.

[randomways]

Just FYI, I had a heavily modded install of OsCommerce 2.2 to which I had tried every available tax calc contribution -- couldn't work out the kinks. The best default solution, IMHO, is to set the New York tax rate to 7% (lowest common denominator) and bridge the gap yourself at tax time. I've been doing this for a couple of years now and since the vast majority of my orders come from out of state it isn't much of a hit to take, and only a few counties are at the high end.

[gjh42]

To be strictly legal, you need to collect tax not just by county but by tax zone; there are at least a dozen municipalities, some very small, that report separately from their counties, and the boundaries are not always by zip code. The only completely accurate method would be a table of each address in the state or asking the customer what the tax rate is at his address and which zone he is in .

Very small businesses can probably get away with being somewhat sloppy, but you never know when it will come back to bite you hard. The lowest-rate method is certainly safest. I know I don't like it when a seller from NYC asks for 8 5/8% while my local rate is 8% (too high already!)

[ranger_lp]

Hi:

If you look at our site, we created a zone for each county/city in NYS (e.g. New York (Albany County). After that we created tax zones for for each of the tax rates. Then we created the zone definitions for each tax zone. Works very well, especially now that we have the dropdown box for states. If you use this method, don't forget to remove New York as a state. We then setup the tax to be calculated against the shipping address.