Amazon's suit vs. North Carolina about preventing e-commerce witch hunt

[djbaxter]

Amazon's suit vs. North Carolina about preventing e-commerce witch hunt
by Larry Dignan
April 20th, 2010

Amazon has filed a lawsuit against North Carolina?s Department of Revenue to prevent the state from getting the names of every resident that bought anything from the retailer since 2003. The ramifications could be huge.

As you may recall, Amazon has been dueling with a few states over taxation issues. States, which are struggling to balance bloated budgets, are mulling over taxing out-of-state Internet retailers.

The Amazon complaint could be alarming for those of us trying to think ahead a few steps. In Amazon?s complaint (download PDF), the company said:

The North Carolina Department of Revenue (the ?DOR?) is demanding that Amazon turn over the name and address of virtually every North Carolina resident who has purchased anything from Amazon since 2003, along with records of what each customer purchased and how much they paid. If Amazon is forced to comply with this demand, the disclosure will invade the privacy and violate the First Amendment rights of Amazon and its customers on a massive scale. But the DOR does not need personally identifiable information about Amazon?s customers in order to audit Amazon?s compliance with state tax laws.All it needs to know is what items Amazon sold to North Carolina customers and what they paid, and Amazon has already provided that information to the DOR.
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[Linda Buquet]

Thanks for posting this important news David. I was just reading about it at a bunch of different places. This battle is heating up!

 

[kindsvater]

It is amazing how little some states care about the administrative burden and expense they place on businesses, not to mention the privacy of their residents.

Interesting is the fact that while Amazon does not have a sufficient nexus in North Carolina to need to charge North Carolina sales tax, the state still thinks it can force Amazon to fork over company sales records.

If North Carolina wants to know what use taxes its residents should be paying on out-of-state purchases, it should send out a few million requests to its own residents.

 

[grado]

how is the result until now? Amazon win or lose? you know, when you rich ,everyone want to get a spoon.

 

[AliceandMosee]

Taxation in eCommerce has always been a VERY gray line especially in the US. Yes, Adsense has W-2s in place and so do a few other major publishers but there are lots of revenues going untaxed in eCommerce, especially through PayPal, while some are goods others are services which may have serious legal ramification.