CEO DATELINE - Booksellers association blasts Amazon for avoiding sales taxes
CEO DATELINE - Booksellers association blasts Amazon for avoiding sales taxes
- January 28, 2016 |
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Walt Williams
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A new study by the American Booksellers Association has concluded that online retail giant Amazon avoided $625 million in state and local sales taxes in 2014—a figure the association said shows the toll the company is taking on local communities.
Internet retailers are not required to collect local or state sales taxes unless they have a physical presence in the state where the taxes are imposed. In the past, Amazon has gone to great lengths to avoid collecting sales taxes, although more recently it has supported efforts to expand the ability of states to collect taxes from online purchases.
No industry has been harder hit by the rise of Amazon than the bookstore industry, with ABA a longtime critic of the company and its business practices. The report by ABA and the economic analysis firm Civic Economics conclude that had Amazon been required to play by the same rules as brick-and-mortar bookstores, states and local governments would have collected the same amount of sales taxes as generated by 3,215 storefronts.
Those storefronts also would have paid $420 million in property taxes, according to ABA. And even though Amazon's distribution centers employ more than 134,000 full- and part-time workers, the company's sales resulted in a net loss of nearly 136,000 jobs.
"Together, this billion-dollar revenue gap (from the loss of sales and property taxes) falls on state and local governments across the nation, and thus on the other sources of revenue that will be required to make up the large and growing shortfall," ABA and Civic Economics said in the report.
Amazon declined to respond to the report when contacted by reporters. http://bit.ly/1RNQQn1
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