Quote:
Originally Posted by BobC
Not necessarily. The idea of charging sales tax on an item being shipped to a buyer is that the sales tax is charged based on where an item is ultimately to be stored or used. It is different from when you actually walk into a store and buy something and take physical possession of the item right there. In that case it doesn't matter what state you may actually live in, you pay sales tax to the state where you physically took possession of an item, based on where the store you bought it from is located. If you were on vacation in say Oregon, and bought some mementoes, collectibles, and such, and then took everything back home with you, to say California, you aren't going to be met at the CA border by one of its sales tax agents demanding you pay CA sales tax on items you're now bringing back into your home state. You wouldn't owe any use tax to CA as you already paid the applicable sales tax to the state the store you bought and took possession of the items you purchased was in, even if it was Oregon that has no sales tax.
There is no law anywhere that says you have to keep everything at your home residence. So if you do decide to have cards you buy sent and kept at an out of state location, that is perfectly acceptable, and something I don't think any state can change by simple legislation. And to then move items from one state to another shouldn't automatically cause the owner to suddenly owe sales taxes on items moved, should it? To argue otherwise could end up opening a huge can of worms. Like for example anytime someone moves from one state to another, and takes all their belongings with them, are they now going to be subject to having all their belongings inspected by someone from the state they are moving into, and potentially getting assessed a sales/use tax on all their belongings they brought with them? That would go over with the voting public like a ton of crap, but is intrinsically the same as storing your cards in one state, and then deciding later to move them elsewhere. And since supposedly not everyone using a vault is doing so just to evade sales taxes, passing any legislation that potentially proves detrimental to them likely won't be viewed in a kind light either. It is not entirely as black and white a question as one may initially think.
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Hey Bob,
Just thinking out loud but while there is no law that says that everything we buy has to be sent and kept in our homes, it is clear most, some, many of the purchases that are going to vaults are not necessarily staying at the vaults. The vaults are a brief stopping point for the purchase which the buyer has every intention of taking physical possession of as soon as possible. I think that is where the gray area may not be so gray.
How that could be enforced, I dunno and since the vault concept is relatively new and I have no statistics on what percentage of the items that are shipped to them stay with them. It is entirely possible the tax evasion practice is not material enough to be worth the effort. I also think it would would be complex to track purchases (entering and leaving the vaults) even if that was the burden of each vault to do on a quarterly basis.
Chase