Tax and spend

Streamlining effort could raise revenues, but at the cost of jobs

Special Report by Chris Graham
freepress2@ntelos.net
 

The state of Virginia is losing as much as $400 million a year to uncollected taxes from Internet retailers. Streamlining a process for collecting them isn’t as easy as some would like to make it out to be – and could cost jobs in the meantime.

“We don’t dodge taxes. We pay our taxes. We pay on time. And if we make a mistake of some sort, we pay our penalties. That’s not the issue. This is supposed to be simple, but it’s everything but simple,” said Stacey Strawn, the co-owner of Blue Moon Galleries, a Waynesboro-based Internet retailer that grew from a desk in a converted bedroom office.

Now employing six, Blue Moon is by every definition a Main Street mom-and-pop – taking up residence in an abandoned building on Main Street in struggling Downtown Waynesboro, with co-owners in the husband-and-wife team of Strawn and Steve Dahl.

It’s the Main Street mom-and-pops who are ostensibly the focus for advocates of a streamlined sales tax. An effort has been under way dating back to the early part of the 2000s decade aimed at corraling the tax revenues lost to the intricacies of the U.S. tax system, which leaves the collection of sales taxes to the individual states and localities. Read more