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Ludicrous! Imagine an employee living out of state doing work at home, like preparing slides for a presentation. No telecommuting, just doing work at a desk. An
by blumentopf 15y ago
Ludicrous! Imagine an employee living out of state doing work at home, like preparing slides for a presentation. No telecommuting, just doing work at a desk. And that's "doing business"?
- pavel_lishin 15y agoWhat about happening to answer the phone while on vacation? Or perhaps working on a server that's located in another state?
- cosgroveb 15y agoWell, Texas has tried recently to say that simply having a server in their state creates a nexus for sales tax purposes...
- voidpointer 15y agoI have no idea how the US tax system works. But how about this thought: from saying you are taxable if running servers in some state, it wouldn't be a big leap saying "your javascript code runs in browsers on computers that are in our state and you are therefore taxable"...
- ianferrel 15y agoA pretty big one. A server is, arguably, a physical location serving products. Javascript running in a browser is the product served. Going with a tried-and-true car analogy, a state can't tax a car manufacturer because the cars drive on their roads, but they can tax them if they produce or sell cars in that state.
- wladimir 15y agoIt is not always that easy to distinguish servers and clients. What about P2P systems such as Skype?
- warren_s 15y agoI can't imagine Rackspace would be happy with the impact that would have on their clients...
- coyled 15y agoIt gets even better when states like New York can't even define what "doing business" actually means: "Most of the law of 'doing business' is found in the decisions of courts. Those cases afford no precise measure of the extent of the activities which may be determinative of whether a foreign organization is doing business in New York for purposes of qualification. Each case must be decided on its own facts." http://www.dos.state.ny.us/cnsl/do_bus.html http://www.dos.state.ny.us/cnsl/do_bus.html [where "foreign" == not organized in New York, not necessarily overseas]