Carfax Loses Bid for Manufacturing Sales Tax Break in Missouri

Carfax Inc. equipment used to produce vehicle history reports isn’t used “directly in manufacturing” to qualify for a sales and use tax exemption, the Missouri Supreme Court ruled.

The company aggregates, annotates, and cleans up information from hundreds of thousands of sources to compile the reports, “but—in the end—the VHR does not (and does not purport) to do anything other than present the customer with whatever information created by others concerning the vehicle that Carfax has been able to obtain,” Chief Justice Paul C. Wilson wrote for the unanimous court in an opinion issued Tuesday.

The court ...