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> As Merchants are not anonymous, they can be taxed, enabling income or sales taxes to be withheld by the state while providing anonymity for Customers. Pullin
by adrianmonk 5y ago
> As Merchants are not anonymous, they can be taxed, enabling income or sales taxes to be withheld by the state while providing anonymity for Customers.
Pulling this off in the United States sounds somewhere between very challenging and impossible.
Sales tax is not uniform. Rates vary not only by state but also at a local level. In some states, sales taxes can be imposed by the state, by counties, by cities, by school districts, by transit authorities, and by other entities like special purpose districts[1].
Which ones (plural) of these sales taxes (plural) apply to a transaction depends on the buyer's location.
In many cases, knowing the buyer's city, state, and zip code is not granular enough. For example, the boundaries of a school district may not correspond to zip code or city.
The typical approach today is to collect the buyer's full address. From that, there are databases that will tell you the list of jurisdictions and taxes that apply. Obviously, that's not very anonymous.
Maybe you could have the buyer determine all of the jurisdictions/taxes that apply to them and send only that info instead. That's less granular, but in some cases it might give away a lot of information. (Sort of like browser fingerprinting.)
But if you do that, I'm not sure what the implications would be for sellers. Sellers are required to collect the sales tax and remit it to the state. They can get in trouble for not doing it right. Governments don't like it when their taxes don't get collected, so they sometimes create laws that put the burden of compliance on the seller.
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[1] Special purpose districts could allow a county or local government to, for example, pick an arbitrary area and impose a sales tax within it just to support libraries that serve that area. Or crime prevention, road improvement, emergency services, hospitals, parks, economic development, etc.
- MoSattler 5y agoMaybe they merely point out that merchants cannot hide their identity and hence be identified and taxed. Not that it would be deducted automatically.
- grothoff 5y agoCorrect. The income is merely made visible. Paying taxes is still something each merchant has to do (and calculate correctly).
- adrianmonk 5y agoI'm talking about the "while providing anonymity for Customers" part. Providing anonymity for customers AND collecting sales tax (in the US) are two goals that conflict with each other. Maybe there are ways to resolve the conflict, but that's far from obvious. I'm not talking about whether it's automatic or whether GNU Taler makes it easier. I'm talking about whether making the seller info public is enough to comply with tax laws.
- croes 5y agoGNU Taler doesn't calculate or automatically pays the tax, it's just to prevent tax fraud so that authorities can check if the paid taxes correlate with the income.
- anamax 5y agoThe point is that SALES tax in the US doesn't correspond with "income" or even revenue. Sales tax isn't determined by the seller's characteristics - it depends on the buyer.
- syrrim 5y agoThis aspect of the buyer can be - and usually is permitted by law to be - determined from the buyer's IP address.
- quadrangle 5y agoThe answer is obvious: get rid of sales taxes. They are the stupidest most regressive taxes we have. They are cumbersome, and they screw with price transparency, and they shouldn't exist. Incidentally, I support taxes in general and think we need more taxes on a lot of things. But taxes add cost to specific activities, and so they should be used to reduce those activities. Now, we don't want the perverse incentive of government relying on tax revenue and thus otherwise wanting to promote the activity. So, we need to find a balance in all these things. But like taxes on stock-trading would be good. And we should probably increase property taxes and just do the simple thing where property tax rates go up the more properties an entity holds (that makes it harder for investment companies to buy up all the properties and gouge everyone with high rents). But for all the justified complexity of tax policy decisions, sales taxes are the worst and should just be eliminated.
- Consultant32452 5y agoAnother difficulty of the taxable feature is that for some retailers their sales tax changes all the time. A simple example is a food truck, sales tax rates can change daily depending on where the truck happens to be parked.
- 7steps2much 5y agoTrue, but to be fair, if you want to pay anonymously at a food truck the easy answer to that problem is cash.
- Consultant32452 5y agoGovernments around the globe are eliminating cash. My guess is within 20 years cash will be a novelty.
- Jolter 5y agoI don’t know if this is obvious to you or not, but this does not sound like a problem for merchants in most parts of the world. US sales tax is insane and not representative of most jurisdictions, globally speaking. I’m not saying you couldn’t use Taler in the US - after all, sales taxes work for cash transactions which also anonymous for the buyer. I’m saying if you want to get automatic correct taxation of merchants, perhaps it’s a good idea to run your experiment outside the US.
- throwawayboise 5y agoI don't see why this would be an issue. Merchants deal with all of this today while accepting cash, which is an anonymous payment. None of this relies on tracking the individual customer. The merchants accepting Taler payments would still be responsible for computing and including the applicable sales taxes in the final price charged to the customer. The customer then pays that, anonymously.