How Amazon’s Fight with North Carolina Could Effect Your Business
North Carolina has picked a fight with the largest Internet retailer, Amazon, over tax records. You don’t live in North Carolina so why should you care?If you own a business that sells products online and Amazon looses this fight, your business could be next to have to submit customer records and possibly pay back taxes to North Carolina. North Carolina redisents by law have to pay taxes on online purchases if the same purchase in physical store would come with a sales tax. Right now businesses that don’t have a physical store in NC can’t be forced to collect the tax, but that doesn’t mean the customer doesn’t owe the tax.
Given provisions of the Patriot Act that forced libraries to turn over records and report on who took out certain books, it seems likely that the privacy behind buying and borrowing books is dead. Since the basis of Amazon’s argument is that to do what NC asks would violate the privacy of what it’s customers are purchasing it seems likely to fail. Additionally, NC could ask for total sales by customer without the data of what they purchased. Amazon certainly has this information and the certainly have the ability to sort the records this way and ultimately they can afford the staff time to do it. The same burden on a small business is huge and while it seems likely Amazon will lose this fight, for the same of small business, we hope they’ll win.