With Congress back from the August recess, attention will quickly shift to the “Must Pass” legislation that has to be approved by the end of the year to avoid calamity. But there are two Internet sales tax bills that should be on everyone’s “Don’t Pass” list, because if either is slipped into moving legislation, it would be a calamity for America’s small- and medium-sized businesses.
We’re talking about the fatally flawed Marketplace Fairness Act (MFA) and the Remote Transaction Parity Act (RTPA), which was supposed to fix the problems with MFA, but actually made a bad bill even worse.
MFA would force America’s online and catalog sellers to comply with the sales tax laws of 10,000 local jurisdictions in our nation, creating costly administrative and compliance burden on small- and medium-sized businesses that can scarcely afford it. It would also expose every single American business to new risks of government audits from any of the 46 states that impose a sales tax.