sales tax insanity

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Glad my hack is helping someone else too!

As Finisher mentioned, it won't work correctly if the customer misspells their city (or state). It also doesn't work if you have more than one city with the same name in a zone ("Springfield" comes to mind). So it's not a perfect solution.

I thought about using County to determine local sales tax, but 1) it's even more likely to be entered wrong by the customer, since it has nothing to do with actually shipping the product (and they may be shipping to someone else and not know their county), and 2) local taxes are often not by county in any case. In California, several cities levy their own sales taxes that are higher than the surrounding counties, and some multi-city transportation systems are paid for by taxing their beneficiaries (maybe whole counties, maybe not). This is why in California they call the portion of sales tax that goes to these local governments "district sales tax" and not "county sales tax".

I also thought about using ZIP code instead, since they are unique and need to be provided correctly by the customer to get their order to its destination. But unfortunately this won't work either. ZIP codes are created by the post office to organize their deliveries, and they do not respect county or district boundaries at all.

So I don't think there is a perfect solution for all situations, especially when I read what other users are doing in other places and see just how different their laws can be. I think that the best way for osC to make this work for everyone in future releases would be to create a "Tax Rules" admin tool where we could choose any criteria we need to match and its corresponding tax rate and description. Then others could help out by making contributions of criteria sets that work for them in their situation, and they could distribute them as contributions that could be modified by the end user via the tool.

This tool should also have some basic options for all taxes, such as apply tax to shipping or billing address, itemize tax separately, etc.

This is actually not that far removed from the existing Tax Zones setup, just with more fields, so perhaps it wouldn't be that tough to implement.

What do you core team folks think - could this be a solution for all osC users?