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Illinois' Online Tax Law Struck Down; Will U.S. Supreme Court Step In?

The Illinois Supreme Court today shot down the state’s 2011 “Amazon” law requiring out-of-state Internet sellers with web marketing affiliates in Illinois to collect Illinois sales taxes on deliveries to the state’s residents.

The Illinois Supreme Court today shot down the  state’s 2011 “Amazon”  law requiring out-of-state Internet sellers with web marketing affiliates in Illinois to collect Illinois sales taxes on deliveries to the state’s residents. The law is modeled on one New York passed in 2008—a law which was upheld by the New York Court of Appeals, the Empire State’s highest court, in a 4-1 decision in March.

Both Amazon.com and Overstock.com have filed petitions asking the U.S. Supreme Court to review the New York decision. While SCOTUS hasn’t said whether it will hear the New York case, the fact that two states’ high courts have reached opposite conclusions increases the chance it will do so, observed David C. Blum, a Chicago lawyer who tracks the internet sales tax issue.  Now the Illinois Department of Revenue, the loser in today’s decision, could also ask the U.S. Supreme Court to step in, he noted.

The U.S. Supreme Court  last weighed in on the issue  of whether remote sellers must collect a state’s sales tax in 1992, when it ruled,  in a case involving a catalog seller (Quill v. North Dakota), that under the Constitution’s commerce clause, only merchants with a physical presence in a state (nexus, in tax-speak) can be required by that state to collect its sales taxes. The high court pointed out, however, that Congress could grant collection powers to the states.

For two decades, bills granting such powers went nowhere in Congress. Then, this past May, by a 69 to 27 vote,  the U.S. Senate passed the Marketplace Fairness Act of 2013 (S. 743) which requires Internet sellers with $1 million a year or more in sales outside their home states to collect each state’s sales tax, provided that state meets some simplification requirements and provides free software to collect the tax.  The bill was backed by the National Retail Federation and such traditional bricks and mortar retailers as Wal-Mart , as well as by Amazon.com, which largely as a result of its growing national network of warehouses, now collects sales taxes from residents of 13 states, including California,  New York and Texas. The Senate-passed bill is opposed by the NetChoice coalition, which counts Overstock, eBay, Yahoo!, Facebook, VeriSign and The Electronic Retailing Association among its members.

Regardless of how the corporate interests line up, the Marketplace Fairness Act faces an iffy future in the fractious House, where it is supported by some Republicans, but opposed by many others.  Technically, consumers are supposed to send their home state the applicable sales tax (or “use tax” as it’s technically called when levied on out of state purchases) if they buy from a web site or catalog merchant that doesn’t collect the tax.  But they almost never do.  Grover Norquist, whose “Taxpayer Protection Pledge” to oppose tax increases has been signed by almost all House Republicans, has declared that the Marketplace Fairness Act  “can only be viewed as a tax increase” and violates that pledge.

Caroline Cournoyer is GOVERNING's senior web editor.
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