Illinois Use tax

That's news to me. As long I dont buy from anyone online who has a physical presence in Arkansas, no sales taxes at all.

But I do recall paying less than 130 dollars total in taxes all together when it was all done retail.

Illinois will only have a record of it if they audit the company from which you purchased the gun. If they do, and if the seller does not have a valid exemption certificate or reseller's certificate from the buyer, Illinois will require the seller to pay the Illinois use tax. The seller will, in turn, bill you for it. Typically, only larger ot of state companies are audited.

Ohio has a space on the individual tax returns for putting in how much you bought on-line from out of state, and they want the sales/use tax, too if none was collected at the point-of-sale.

Oh yes. I always voluntarily declare everything I buy online so I can pay more taxes to this fabulous state.

Now that my county has raised the sales tax another 1% (for the children), I'm sure I'll being buying more stuff locally to do my part in supporting the schools I don't use.

The state primarily goes after out of state cigarette purchases. They started including that form a couple years ago when (surprise!) they raised the tobacco tax (again...) and (surprise!) people started buying them just across the border in free states. Our highly ethical governor assumed everyone would be as ethical as him and want to voluntarily make up the lost tax revenue.

Illinois hs required this as a matter of law for a long time. Vanishingly few people actually pay those taxes. As far as I know, no one has been prosecuted for it. The state has no way to know who bought what or where. The post office doesn't give them any info. The banks don't give them any info. At least not without a court order. Also, the state has no authority to "audit" out of state mail order companies that have no physical presence in the state per Supreme Court precedence.

Illinois has required this as a matter of law for a long time. Vanishingly few people actually pay those taxes. As far as I know, no one has been prosecuted for it. The state has no way to know who bought what or where. The post office doesn't give them any info. The banks don't give them any info. At least not without a court order. Also, the state has no authority to "audit" out of state mail order companies that have no physical presence in the state per Supreme Court precedence.

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Actually, the state does have that right if a company ships its good into the state whether or not the shipper has a physical presence within the state. Before I retired, I was a sales tax administrator for a large multi-national corporation based in Chicago. Sales & use tax audits are quite common by most states. However, they primarily target larger businesses to get the biggest bang for their buck. Since our annual sales were over $4 billion, we were subjected to at least 6 out of state tax audits per year.

I've had to babysit out of state tax auditors many, many times. They typically ask to see sales invoices for a given period of time. If they find that products were shipped to a customer with no valid exemption on file and no tax collected, they collect the tax from the seller. If their sample covered 2 months worth of sales they will annualize the tax not collected and require payment for same.

Most places have a use tax IIRC, but few people have heard of it or know what it is. It's currently such a difficult thing to enforce that it's not worth the effort. With online sales out of state becoming a way of life, the economics may change sometime in the foreseeable future, but who's to say?

Rmeju

Actually, the state does have that right if a company ships its good into the state whether or not the shipper has a physical presence within the state.

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They why doesn't Illinois audit Amazon and eBay, at least? Go for the two huge ones that probably account for 20% of residential mail order between them?

It doesn't happen. No state does it, as far as I know.

Why not?

Several states have such laws. However, I believe they may technically be unconstitutional (note that there is currently no legal ruling regarding this) because only Congress has the right to regulate interstate commerce. It's essentially a tariff, a means to tax out-of-state goods to prevent them from having a price advantage over local goods, and such things are solely the domain of Congress. I'm honestly surprised nobody has challenged it in Federal court yet.

Maine recently (<6mo ago) announced that they would start charging use taxes on airplanes that stayed in their state longer than X days. They found out that people would go out of state, buy an airplane (without paying sales tax) and then keep forgetting to pay the taxes on it.

The problem was the X days they chose was low enough that people with vacation homes in Maine could easily go over that limit over the course of the year if they flew up for a few weekends and kept their plane parked on the taxiway rather than having it fly back to the originating airport.

Kharn