Video Transcription:

Welcome back, I hope you enjoyed the last video and found that informative.

I like breaking it up into bite-size chunks because tax is complicated.

You may think it’s not, certainly, there’s a lot of people simplifying it but that’s really oversimplifying it.

So, I have to break it up and I hope that this will help you along in sort of making sure that you’re making the right decisions for you and for your business.

Right now, I want to talk about the Wayfair case, it’s a big case, it’s all over the news.

You got Trump tweeting about it, you got the states going crazy trying to get some old court case overturned from 25 years ago, acting like this is the problem.

This is why they haven’t been able to collect the tax, this is what hurt the local economies, but that’s actually false.

We had two states this year, passed laws to require Amazon to collect, Washington and Pennsylvania, and when they did that, that was just simply changing the law.

They didn’t need the constitutional precedent to be overturned or to be changed. They just had to pass a law saying marketplaces collect.

Now did they even need to pass a law? Questionable, I actually think if you look at the law it’s already there, the authority to make the marketplace collect.

But, they changed the law, made it abundantly clear Amazon collects 100% of the sales, and use tax in Pennsylvania and in Washington. No change of no constitutional law or Supreme Court case required.

So, why are all these states, you know, standing before the court right now claiming that that’s not true, that they need this.

I mean the reality is, it’s just they’ve been avoiding some. There’s just something they’ve been avoiding with taxing Amazon and making Amazon collect tax almost as if, you know, all these years of making deals with Amazon for warehouses versus an exchange for these sort of sales tax exemptions.

It’s just they’re afraid to just start saying, you know what, this is enough, we’re going to make you pass, you know, enforce the tax law. We’re going to enforce the tax law and make you collect sales tax from your customer.

Whatever it is, it’s, you know, the point of this is it’s to just tell you that it’s really complicated because a lot of people talk about this Wayfair case and they say, you know, this is the case that’s going to determine physical presence, and physical presence is going to get overturned because why else would they have taken the case, and once it gets overturned we’re all in deep trouble.

Well, a lot of the Amazon FBA merchants technically have no, this case has no bearing on them from the state’s perspective because the states have already been going after them.

They think your FBA presence in an FBA warehouse is enough to give you that nexus that would require you to collect tax in that state on every sale you make via Amazon, via eBay, whatever it is, but the reality is that’s not true. The states don’t know what they’re talking about, there is still a lot that has to happen, there’s still a lot that needs to be figured out.

Even if it is physical presence, there’s other legal considerations that you have to consider, there’s the due process clause.

So, please don’t just go throwing yourself into the fire because some tax services firm is telling you that this is it, that we’re going to lose.

If you actually listen to the audio, it’s available on the supreme court website, and you listen to the way that the courts are talking, there’s no way that this is already sort of a foregone conclusion that the states are going to overturn anything.

And so, you know, please whatever you do take care of yourself, watch yourself, be careful, just don’t think that your situation’s the same as everybody else’s. Look out for the traps and if you have any questions reach out to me.

I’ve been helping a lot of the Amazon merchants, I’ve done a lot of videos and I’ve been in a lot of news articles and major publications. So, please, I’m happy to talk to you a bit more about your situation. Thank you so much have a great day.