So far, 1, 000 merchants have signed up to voluntarily collect taxes for the SSUTA states, Duncan reports.
As of Jan. 1, 15 states will be full participants in SSUTA, meaning they've adopted the required changes to their own laws.
More to the point, SSUTA supporters make some rather utopian assumptions regarding how small businesses would be compensated when complying with such a system.
The 4, 700-member Direct Marketing Association is fighting any new authority for the states, arguing the SSUTA has barely reduced the tax collection burden presented by 7, 500 different sales jurisdictions.
They also believe they can make a stronger case for new collection authority now that the SSUTA, which is designed to harmonize and simplify sales tax laws, is finally operating.
Among the problems: The SSUTA requires a state and its cities to use the same definition of what's taxable and allows each local taxing jurisdiction only one sales tax rate.
However, U.S. Senators Mike Enzi (Republican--Wyoming) and Byron Dorgan (Democrat--North Dakota) are pushing legislation that would give the SSUTA the backing of federal law, turning a voluntary project into a mandatory one.
There are more than 7, 000 sales tax jurisdictions in the U.S. The SSUTA is meant to reconcile state sales-and-use tax rules and bring uniformity to the definition of items in the sales-tax base.
Rather than adopting a single tax rate per state, as the DMA demanded, the SSUTA made only "cosmetic" changes, and the states are "cheating" on even those, DMA tax counsel George S. Isaacson says.
Along with the stick, the states used a carrot: In 2002 they formed the Streamlined Sales and Use Tax Agreement (SSUTA) to make it easier for merchants to collect taxes for all 9, 600 U.S. sales tax jurisdictions.
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The Main Street Fairness Act incorporates the simplification measures of the Streamlined Sales and Use Tax Agreement (SSUTA), which was developed about ten years ago by a group of states and businesses with the goal of making it easier for businesses to collect sales tax for multiple states.
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