State of Wayfair: Sales Tax Patchwork ‘Nightmarishly Complex’

Small businesses confront “nightmarishly complex” tax administration duties in the era of e-commerce and will ask Congress to impose a “straightforward taxing regime” across the 46 jurisdictions that have statewide sales taxes.

Testimony prepared for a House hearing on Tuesday contains pleas for federal intervention leading to a harmonized system, from small retailers frustrated by the patchwork of rules, rates, and administrative tasks in state sales tax laws.

Those laws proliferated after the U.S. Supreme Court’s 2018 ruling in South Dakota v. Wayfair allowed states to impose taxes on sales by vendors without a physical presence in their states. ...