COVID-19 and the MTCThe Spring Committee Meetings will now be held via teleconference only due to the COVID-19 pandemic and the unprecedented steps taken by national and state governments to address the outbreak. Read more
National Geographic — Still Relevant After Wayfair?In this article, Richard Cram, MTC director of the National Nexus Program, argues that the decision in South Dakota v. Wayfair, which overturned the physical presence requirement in Quill v. North Dakota and National Bellas Hess v. Illinois, did not disturb the holding in National Geographic Society v. California that a state may impose its use tax collection obligation on an out-of-state seller that has physical presence in that state, even when such physical presence is unrelated to the sales activity on which the use tax collection obligation is imposed. National Geographic remains good law in determining nexus when the out-of-state seller’s economic presence falls below the state’s economic nexus threshold.Read more
Wayfair Implementation – Marketplace Facilitator Collection Project White Paper The Uniformity Committee established the work group on Wayfair Implementation and Marketplace Facilitator Collection project as a project to address issues concerning the states implementation of the U.S. Supreme Court’s Wayfair decision, giving states the authority to impose sales and use taxes on remote sellers, and enacting requirements for marketplace facilitators to collect and remit those taxes on marketplace sales. The work group’s goal has been to develop recommendations for maximizing compliance while minimizing the burden on remote sellers, marketplace facilitators and marketplace sellers. The work group has produced a white paper (which we will continue to update, periodically) which is available here . Read more
Wayfair, What’s Fair, and Undue BurdenMichael Fatale, deputy general counsel at the Massachusetts Department of Revenue and adjunct professor at Boston College Law School, discusses the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision in South Dakota v. Wayfair, Inc., 138 S. Ct. 2080 (2018). After revisiting the Supreme Court’s prior holdings in and the history of National Bellas Hess, Inc. v. Dep’t of Rev. of Illinois (1967) and Quill Corp. v. North Dakota (1992), Fatale then turns to the history and text of the South Dakota statute at issue in Wayfair. Finally, he considers the legal theories evaluated by the Supreme Court in Wayfair — in particular the notions of discrimination, due process, and undue burden. The article was originally published in the Chapman Law Review and is made available here by permission.Read more
Current Economic ConditionsElliott Dubin and intern Emma Snyder of the MTC, using data from a number of sources, provides a snapshot of current economic condition of the states; and, a forecast of economic conditions in the near future. Needless to say, the current economic conditions of the states vary widely; and, even short-term predictions of the economy are not always precise. Read more
Fifty years of MTC Uniformity EffortsThe Not-So-Obvious Lessons Like uniformity itself, the efforts to achieve uniformity also serve a greater purpose. This article by Helen Hecht, MTC general counsel, explains why. Read more
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