States struggling with online and catalog sales tax

For example, he said, if someone from Park City buys a book from Sam Weller's Books on Salt Lake's Main Street at the store, he'd pay around 6 percent sales tax. But if he buys the same-priced book from Amazon.com and has it shipped to his home, or if he buys the same book via a Sam Weller's catalog or online service, he'd pay 8 percent sales tax.

That's because Park City imposes a special "resort" tax. And under the new streamline system, the tax rate at the point of delivery determines the tax paid. At Weller's Main Street store's cash register, that's the point of delivery — and in Salt Lake City the sales tax rate is set at 6 percent for the streamline tax.

Confusing? You bet.

And for many small retailers who will have to install new computer systems to track the thousands of sales tax rates in communities across the nation, "the cost of compliance is significant," said Johnson.

But Utah, Ohio and other retailers won't have to worry about the new system for another few months, legislators noted, as state after state that has already adopted the new off-site sales tax collection system puts off implementation until July 2005 or beyond.

A good solution to even that discrepancy would be to have just one sales tax rate across Utah, Johnson said. And some Utah legislators are looking at trimming back the various sales tax add-ons, whether for resort communities, arts and zoos or transit district.

A one-rate state "would stop the zoning for businesses" that goes on now, he said.

A classic example of that came years ago when Salt Lake City leaders used an abandoned railroad line to connect the city's southern boundary with the new Brickyard shopping complex to annex the center, giving the city sales tax revenue from the area instead of the unincorporated county.

Other legislators gave other examples of strange, tax-seeking actions. One said in his state groups of local attorneys are approaching big retailers with "deals" from surrounding small communities, whose leaders offer property tax rebates and other incentives if the business will relocate just its billing office to their home turf, and thus provide the local town with huge new sales tax revenue.

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E-mail: bbjr@desnews.com