Amazon Forbids Crossing State Lines With Rented Textbooks 125
New submitter Galaga88 writes "In what is probably another attempt to evade charging sales tax, Amazon's terms of use through Warehouse Deals forbids crossing state lines with certain rented textbooks. The penalty for doing so? Retroactive forced purchase of the book. At least it's yours to keep afterwards. 'Some experts believe the policy is another reflection of the extreme lengths to which the company continues to go in order to avoid collecting state sales taxes. But could Amazon’s use restriction and other complicated rental conditions cause problems for students or lead potential textbook renters to take their business elsewhere? It seems like a policy that would be nearly impossible to enforce. But Richard Hershman, vice president of government relations at the National Association of College Stores, points out that if a student has textbooks sent to her home state and ships them back from a different state where she attends college, Amazon could easily note the new shipping location.'"
Re:Covering butt (Score:4, Insightful)
That "ridiculous lawmaking" is state and local governments trying to collect sales taxes.
This is a whack a mole competition where corporations look for ways to avoid sales taxes and states try to patch up the loopholes.
The corporations could just step up and acknowledge their civic responsibility to collect and pay sales taxes but they don't... hence the game.
Re:Covering butt (Score:5, Insightful)
It's certainly a doable thing, but it ain't easy, nor is there any mechanism for knowing what is the 'correct' tax to charge at a given point.
Next up, is it shipping address? Billing address? what if the tax rates are different between them?
What if the tax rate varies on other factors?
What if my IP says I'm in Sweden, what then?
It's not as easy as collect the tax when there are quite a few permutations that don't tell you when they change.
Re:Covering butt (Score:5, Insightful)
Believe it or not, there are people with computers and databases that track this information and it all can be done automatically.
You can obfuscate it if you're trying avoid paying tax or you can just pay the tax.
Re:Covering butt (Score:3, Insightful)
This more than manageable and there are already services out there that provide an up-to-date database to their customers. Home Depot, Best Buy, Apple, and others seem to have little trouble calculating the correct sales tax when a customer orders online.
They calculate tax from the shipping address not the IP address.
Evade, or avoid? (Score:4, Insightful)
To "evade [wikipedia.org]" taxes is illegal. But to "avoid" taxes is legal.
Even a "tax shelter [wikipedia.org]" that avoids paying 100% of tax might be legal, depending on circumstances.
There is wide agreement that taxes discourage people from certain behaviors, and tax breaks encourage people to do whatever gives the tax break. So, for example, J. Random Person could invest in solar panels on the roof of his home, and potentially get enough of a tax credit [energystar.gov] to offset his tax liability.
Should we be angry that someone paid no taxes? The tax break on solar panels was there to encourage people to invest in solar panels, and J. Random Person did that. This is the system working as intended. Society wanted to encourage more solar panels, and more solar panels were in fact installed.
Now, consider Amazon. The current weird tax system is the law of the land. (I think a "flat tax [asktaxguru.com]" with no exceptions would have many good features, but it's just a fantasy at this point. We are so far from a flat tax that it's really not worth discussing.) If Amazon can do some weird thing like banning interstate use of rented books, and the tax system is currently set up to reward that, then I don't blame Amazon for doing it.
If you don't like it, maybe you should tell your elected representatives that you would like to see changes in the way sales tax works.
P.S. I am not claiming that the current sales tax system was intentionally set up to encourage Amazon to take these steps. The tax code is so convoluted now that weird corner-cases must be expected. But whether this was intended or not, if that's what the law encourages Amazon to do, and we don't change the law, we shouldn't be surprised if Amazon does this.
Re:Covering butt (Score:5, Insightful)