RE: Local, City, County Sales Tax and Taxes

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Very cool Zap!
I tried your modification and it seems to be working very well. I'm glad I stumbled upon this discussion again. I must by mistake have signed myself off to follow this thread...

I was glad to see that there are people still working on this issue. I was a little disscourage with the tax "mania" for a while. The modification that was mentioned earlier in this thread first worked but then for a strange reason didn't. Of course it stopped working when I was showing it to my client!

Anyhow, this seems to work well...

Just another note regarding taxes. I did call the State equalization two times after I posted last on this thread. It was to say the least interesting, and amuzing.

I got the same response twice but it seemed like they didn't quite have it under control there. It's funny that their "on-hold" message was something like this:

[quote]We encourage you to write us instead of calling. This way you will be sure to get the proper information and you will have the information legally on paper should there be any changes[/quote]

I don't know if this was exactly the message, but sort of anyhow. Who writes snail-mail these days anymore?? *ha,ha*

The response was both times. You have to charge taxes depending on where you ship the item, not where your billing address is. And you are only responsible of charging county (or Use Tax as Zap  called it) within your own county region. If you send an item to another county within the state of CA you would only charge CA sales tax. HOWEVER, the customer legally should be responsible of paying the difference. i.e Use tax.

I was blown away by this loose term and I gave the personnel an example:

I said: -What if my business sells for instance bread toasters with a value of $14.95 each to hundreds of thousands of recidents spread across the state of California. How will the customer know that they may be liable to pay their share of their own local tax?

Their response was: Oh we have our ways!

So I asked: - How in the world will you contact every single bread toaster buyer about their local taxes?

They didn't really say much except for that they would be capable of doing so...and then they suggested I could have a sentence of information somewhere on the checkout page saying that the customer may need to take care of their share of local taxes for this product...

Right on!

I haven't seen any other e-commerce site do this yet either...

So I suppose Zap's solution works well for now...

Except for maybe if someone spells their shipping home city wrong...

Like: SAN FRANSISKO

Which "hopefully" shouldn't happen too often. But it could, in which case I suppose the customer has supplied wrongful information?and it would be their fault that they aren't charged proper tax.

Has anyone ever experienced the Canadian tax system? I did once...You get a form when you leave the country and if you fill it in you will be re-funded for all sales tax for goods and some services like hotels.

NOW THAT'S WHAT I LIKE! :P  :D  :)  :lol: