OT: How to sew aspen pad netting for evap coolers?

In California, even if you ship out of state, we are still required to charge CA sales taxes since this is our place of business. yes, we got that direct from the good folks at the FTB (twice!)

I think you'll find that MS has a presence in every state.

Good idea (both).

It's a good habit to get into. It saves some "revenue enhancement" issues at other times, too.

A lot of things are "visible" and just as easily ignored.

Sure, why should "services" be exempt from the tax man?

I believe the information given to you is wrong. It is not the FTB that handles sales tax but the Board of Equalization and here is some info from them about this topic:

My thoughts there are based on just how much money it is -- and how it continues to grow: Politicians can smell new funding sources from miles away. :-)

But I am rather ignorant about it all. Could you tell me what SCotUS decided relating to this matter?

Interesting. This directly contradicts what we have been told (TWICE) when we asked about this...

Charlie

Best to ask a tax pro in cases like that, or research the law yourself. I've had many cases where the information from an agency was flat wrong. In your case they seemed to have "conveniently" erred in their favor and I bet they won't want to give you back anything, not one red cent. But for darn sure I'd try.

This was in one of those small business seminars about taxes. Two things they harped on - one, if you sell out of state, but ship from in state, you owed sales taxes on the sale and two - if you give a customer a demonstration unit or sample for their permanent use, you owed sales taxes on the value of the unit...

Charlie

Maybe seminars offered by the FTB aren't very good ones then :-)

Sometimes it pays to research stuff on your own, even if it takes several hours. My comeuppance was a month ago when the super duper expensive professional software of my tax service steadfastly insisted that we overpaid our HSA to the tune of over $3k. If I had let that one slide we'd have left lots of money on the table. Oh, and their "professional" software had also screwed up the estimated payment calcs by a few Dollars last year so we "owed" a $16 penalty this April 17th. Hurumph! So this time I whipped out the HP11C and calculated it myself.

Should just be able to refile your taxes, at least for a couple of years, no?

Sure, and many of them have as low regard for the Constitution as do you.

Basically, a state's tax department has no interstate jurisdiction. Interstate commerce is entirely under the federal government's purview. Effectively, a state cannot force an entity that has no presence in the state do much of anything, including being its tax collector.

I don't know if amending is as easy with the Board of Equalization. A friend told me that he accidentally switched the checks sent in for sales tax and state income tax on his business. Should have been easy to fix but that became a major ordeal to set straight.

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tax on shipping in state should be a no brainer, if it weren't so every shop could put a computer in the corner where you could log on to a server in a state with no saletax, order and ship it to you car in parking lot from the warehouse that just happens to be next door

-Lasse

mail order for something that mundane.

al

Although they have gotten better, big box stores were notorious for feast or famine inventory stocking. I remember when the plumbing supply section at my local HD offered nothing but pegs with expected delivery date stickers. (ETA was February, I needed new kitchen drain parts in March.) So I ended up driving an extra seven miles round trip to an Ace Hardware.

But to answer the question: when you're in swamp cooler country there must be local shops that sell and service swamp coolers, and thus stock swamp cooler supplies. I remember being in AZ one springtime, reading ads in the local paper urging residents to stock up now. These were local businesses, not national chains.

You could even let your fingers do the walking in the Yellow Pages!

order for something that mundane.

That must have been a long time ago. Nowadays out here the drill is that you do your own maintenance. When people can't do that any longer because they can't safely scale a roof anymore or simply can't bend then they take it all down and use the regular A/C. Seen it many times.

It's the same with pellet stoves. In our area there is essentially one guy who services and repairs them. He is pretty busy in winter.

SWMBO did that with two checks to businesses (credit card and power bill, IIRC). The power company called and said "what's this?". The bank never could wrap their arms around the fact that they put the check through. ...and didn't care that we had the cancelled check proving it. Never could get then to refund the money.