No matter what the court says, there are plenty of issues remaining for continuing confusion.

Diane Yetter, owner of Yetter Tax Consulting and founder of the Sales Tax Institute, notes that the modern world has its share of bewilderment for business owners.

“They are baffled and confused and new ways of doing business,” says Yetter. She notes the growth of Amazon sellers who started in business “to make a little money. Now they are making a lot of money. Nobody has educated them about the tax rules.”

There are those trying. Multi-office accounting firms often have indirect tax practices. But smaller firms often lack the knowledge to educate clients about the topic. There are some who are making the effort

“What I get a lot is people with remote sales,” says Brent Watson, a CPA, who in September started Salta, a so-far one-person consulting business for sales and property taxes. Watson, who spent June 2014 through September 2017 with Grant Thornton as a manager of state and local tax, works with CPA firms to provide services to their clients and with businesses to be “0.2 FTE state and local tax department”.

Watson was among attendees at Avalara’s Crush conference recently. And many of them were looking for ways to help make the fact-finding process easier.

Another was Cheryl Johnson, a senior tax analyst at Ascend Learning, a company whose businesses include providing elearning services for the healthcare industry. The questions are “Where are we going and where are we going?” Johnson notes. That includes dealing with geographic expansion. Outside of the United States, the company’s businesses operate in the United Kingdom and they are going into Asian and African countries.

Among those facts which are hard to determine is nexus. It becomes very complicated by remote sellers who use fulfillment centers, according to Watson. “You don’t know where the company has a warehouse,” he says. “They don’t know where they have nexus. I have seen people get burned by that over and over.”

 A similar set of difficult-to-determine facts faces those selling petroleum products, particularly those in the middle—those who buy from the refineries and sell to other companies in the distribution channel including wholesalers, trucking companies and gasoline stations.

Thomas Kim, tax manager for IPC USA, notes companies like his can be unpleasantly surprised by lack of adequate record keeping by their customers. The customers need to have a copy of fuel tax licenses. If buyers do not have those records, the tax liability falls back on the seller.

“You can be talking tens of millions of dollars” he says. Kim notes his company has 4,000 customers with millions of gallons of sales involving many tax jurisdictions and tax documents to track.  After all, the basic premise of the excise tax world is that the fuel is taxed only once during its movement through the distribution chain. 

“If we don’t have good documentation, we fail at audit and the tax liability goes up with penalties and duties,” he says.

The question of liability also depends on state relationships  and where IPC sets in the distribution chain. In some states the first receivable in the chain is tax exempt. In Colorado, the third transaction is tax exempt.  “How do you know you are third?” Kim says.

What Kim is seeking is a system that can handle these issues end-to-end. So far, he has not found one.

Lack of standards remains a problem that frustrates Yetter. She says the Streamlined Sales Tax initiative at least provided a conversation about “how to come together and recognize some of these challenges” and some definitions states could agree to.

The problem of conflicting laws remains.

Yetter notes Texas has revised regulations on computer software. While all other states tax software based on the location of users, Texas has decided to tax based on the location of servers. So if a company like Hewlett-Packard has a server farm in Texas and users in other locations, they face taxation in all locations.

“We are never going to get all the states to have the same taxability and the same definitions,” says Yetter. But she continues, “We need the states to work together.”