[Exhibitman]

Those who think eBay is engaged in some scheme of collecting taxes and then not turning the money into the states, that is not a serious discussion. eBay is a public company with audited financials. Where exactly on its financials would it hide millions in sales taxes collected each reporting period but not remitted? Also, that sort of crap would require a grand conspiracy among the C-suite people, the accounting staff, and the outside auditors. eBay may be remitting unnecessarily but it is undoubtedly remitting. In that vein, I have no complaint with paying eBay to handle the sales taxes for me because tracking all of the interstate sales taxes, including keeping up with the laws for every jurisdiction, is an unbelievable pain in the ass. Even if you owe nothing, once you are registered in a jurisdiction and issued a resale # you must do the return every reporting period, even if you have nothing to report. I have clients who have to do that for their businesses and it is a Herculean effort every quarter. I will gladly pay a small fee to avoid it. It even simplifies my sales tax remittance for Cali; instead of my collecting and remitting CA sales tax I just post all of the eBay sales in one spot on the return and done. No district tracing, no county tracing, no tracking the funds, just done. The few quarters I've done it so far it has cut substantial time from my sales tax work, at my hourly rate it is definitely more time saved than the amount eBay has taken from me for the fee.