As someone who grew up in a house who's mailing address and zip code were for a different town and county from the actual physical location of the house (it was just past the border) - I can't even begin to imagine how to actually do this completely correctly.
Apple has asked me several times in the past for online purchases. I enter a ZIP code, they do some lookup and ask me to choose the county I live in from a list of three. I choose, and based on that they calculate tax.
That’s great until one has customers living in Los Angeles City vs. Los Angeles County. The city charges its own sales and use tax, I believe it’s an additional 0.25%.
And then factor in “Enterprise Zones” where even different portions of cities have different tax rates.
Honestly, the state doesn't expect anyone to get this completely right except the largest companies. If you make a good faith effort to comply with laws, in the vast majority of cases, you're fine.
No! Selective enforcement is terrible, if there's a revenue threshold bake it into the law, otherwise you'll see large companies crying foul on some up-and-coming competitor that then gets bogged down in legislation, along with all the other terrible thing inherit in selectively enforced laws.
> if there's a revenue threshold bake it into the law
There's no real winning there either. If you bake the threshold into the law, some companies may game the system such that, if the cost of total compliance is x, and we're revenue range of x, give or take, to just take a little less money to stay under the threshold.
Not that I'm suggesting that is something that we should care about, or even consider a majority worry, but hard and fast cliffs lead to gamesmanship, or worse, misaligned incentives (such that it's non-beneficial for those on welfare to work if it puts them over a given benefits threshold.)
On the whole, I agree that selective enforcement is bad, if not wholly terrible, but its absence isn't a panacea either.
I spent the last couple years working at a company in a highly-regulated space. I agree with the comment you replied to, and "selective enforcement" is not how I'd describe it.
Think of, say, a teacher. Suppose a teacher gives a complex assignment, provides contact information and says students can and should ask questions, submit drafts for feedback, etc. And there are two students who take different approaches. Student A simply glances over the assignment sheet, goes off and does what they want, then hands it in on the last day. Student B asks questions early and often to clarify anything they're not sure about, runs a draft or two past the teacher, and makes changes in response to feedback.
Student B is much more likely to get a good grade on the assignment. Student A is much more likely to get a low grade out of the blue for making serious mistakes.
And this isn't selective grading, it's just a reflection of the effort each student put into getting the assignment right. Both students had equal opportunity to put in that effort, but only Student B actually did, and it shouldn't be seen as a problem if Student B's diligence pays off.
Rerun that scenario with a large (5000+), but unknown, number of teachers each giving one or more assignments which may or may not be assigned to a particular student. That's sales tax in the USA.
The 200 transactions is basically the lower bound here unless your ASP is >$500. Sell something for 99 cents to 200 people? Congrats, now you have to spend more than your revenue worth of time.
I don't find that to be a valid excuse. If a law is worded in such a way that companies or individuals will frequently get it wrong, it's probably a bad law. Call me paranoid, but that seems like it just sets a person up with an easy reason to audit.
It's not an excuse. It's just that laws are enforced by people. Think of what happens if you get caught speeding. Does everyone always get a ticket every time they speed? Of course not. Even when you get pulled over you can behave politely and maybe get off with a warning. This is how every law and regulation works.
Unless some enforcement agent somewhere happens to disagree with your politics, religion, or shoesize and decides to charge-stack your fines and penalties into the millions.
