Incorrect processing of Tax

[wilt]

I've been investigating this issue and have come up with a reason that it is failing.

The biggest issue relates to how customer accounts are being created, and maybe you can confirm.
The current default in Zen Cart is not to use dropdowns for state zones. e.g states are entered free hand.

In this scenario the entered State is not checked against the potential states allowed for a country
e.g I can enter a state called "florid" and there will be no validation on this, even if a correct state is entered it still wont be validated against correct states allowed for the country id subsequently the entry zone id in a customer address book is set to 0

Furthermore all of our tax calculations attempt to match a tax zone id against an adddressbook entry zone id and will never match as the addressbook entry zone id is always 0

There are mitigations we can make here. e.g trying to find the real zone id from the country id/state in the zone table and this will work if the customer has entered a valid state name (e.g FL or Florida) but will fail if they have entered an incorrect state name .e.g. "florid"

I do have some ideas how we can further mitigate if the customer has entered an invalid state name, but this requires an intervention at various places in code

Will post more about this

[dbltoe]

I the non-functioning test site, we have only one customer. That customer's entry_zone_id is correctly shown in the database. zone_counry_id - 23, zone_id - 57, zone_code - TX and zone_name - Texas. The store is set to Florida and all buttons are in the green.

The test site also does not use dropdown state information for log in. BUT, some browsers enter the data with autofill.

[wilt]

k. thanks.
then it maybe there is something else going wrong.
will do a quick test with your data.

[dbltoe]

It's greatly appreciated.

I can provide full access if needed.

[wilt]

Just another question.

Assume your scenario is this

Store is set to be in Florida e.g STORE_ZONEi 18, STORE_COUNTRY = 223
Customer is in Texas with correct entry zone id in database

Surely Florida tax regs say you only collect tax on an in state customer, but not for out of state

[dbltoe]

I set it to Florida to match the test site created by lat9

Shouldn't it make no difference as Zen Cart is told rather than decides how to procecss tax?

We're still telling it to display at product (doesn't when returning to the shopping cart) and collect based on the store (does sometimes but does not include the amount in the total).

[wilt]

I think we might be getting confused here and I'm not grokking what your expected outcome is

If I set product tax to be 'Store' based then Zen Cart will only calculate some tax if the customer is in the same 'zone' as the store.
Therefore if the store is Florida and the customer is in Texas then tax will be calculated at zero

think all the posts in this thread might be confusing what your main issue is

Happy to go back to first principles

[wilt]

Note as well
US sales/shipping tax related to e-commerce is a nightmare

e.g. California has a mix of origin and destination based taxes (its always California)

and there are some things Zen Cart does not handle (eg county/district based taxes)

Lots of rich tax lawyers out there.

[dbltoe]

If I set product tax to be 'Store' based then Zen Cart will only calculate some tax if the customer is in the same 'zone' as the store.

If this is true, how can our customer (New Mexico) comply with his state’s tax law that requires he charge tax on all sales?

Isn’t that what tax based on store should really do?

[dbltoe]

To begin again, again....

Store is based in New Mexico. You can find information that New Mexico store owners both do (07/23) and do not (07/21) have to charge tax to all customers.

I have been unable to get a response from New Mexico's tax folks as to the TRUE setting. Meanwhile, we have to go with tax applied to anyone shopping at the site and sending anywhere.

The zone has to be set in order to determine the amount of tax (it's Gross Receipts vs Sales Tax in New Mexico), correct?

If the goal is to charge everyone who visits the site a tax rate of 7.72%, what would be the settings in Zen Cart to facilitate this process?

I have been unable to find any combination that accomplishes this.