In late June 2018, the U.S. Supreme Court reversed a long-standing position and ruled that a physical presence was not required for a state to impose a sale and use tax collection obligation on an out-of-state business.South Dakota v. Wayfair, Inc. overturned the court’s 1992 Quill Corp. v. North Dakota decision, which had upheld the physical presence nexus standard established by the court in 1967 in National Bellas Hess v. Department of Revenue of Illinois. The court in Wayfair concluded that the physical presence rules it had previously endorsed was “unsound” and an “incorrect interpretation of the Commerce Clause.”
In 1993, even before the Quill dust had settled, South Carolina’s highest court concluded that Quill applied only to sales and use tax and the concept of economic nexus could be applied to the state’s income tax. In Geoffrey, Inc. v. South Carolina, the South Carolina Supreme Court ruled that an out-of-state intellectual property licensing company was subject to the state’s income tax because it was regularly exploiting the markets of the state, notwithstanding the lack of a physical presence. Following the South Carolina court’s lead, the supreme courts of several other states – including Iowa, Massachusetts, New Jersey, and West Virginia – similarly held that economic nexus could be applied to state taxes other than sales and use tax. At last count, more than 40 states had adopted either by statute or through case law an economic nexus standard for income or franchise tax.
While Wayfair, Quill, and National Bellas Hess addressed whether an out-of-state retailer had an obligation to collect and remit sales and use tax, the Wayfair decision’s implications extend to other state-imposed taxes.
For further information visit : https://www.financialexecutives.org/FEI-Daily/August-2018/Implications-of-Wayfair-Beyond-Sales-Tax.aspx
What is sales and use tax nexus?
In the state tax area, nexus is an important concern for companies that have a multi-state presence because it is a threshold issue that must be evaluated to determine whether a business has tax filing and collection obligations in a particular jurisdiction. Tax nexus refers to the amount and type of business activity that must be present before the business is subject to the state’s taxing authority—so-called “substantial nexus”. State tax nexus considerations differ by tax type and jurisdiction and are subject to federal constitutional restrictions.
Until recently, the constitutional test of substantial nexus for sales and use tax purposes required an out-of-state seller to have a physical presence in a state before that state could require the seller to collect and remit sales and use taxes (Quill v North Dakota (1992)). However, the recently decided Supreme Court case of Wayfair v. South Dakota has thrown out the Quill physical presence nexus standard.
If physical presence is no longer the constitutionally required nexus standard for sales and use tax liability in all states, what is the new standard?
It’s going to take a little while to figure that out for each state. While it is true that the Wayfair case overturned the Quill physical presence standard for all states, it left open to each state to decide what specifically replaces it within the guidelines of Wayfair. In South Dakota, this means that South Dakota state courts will now “redecide” whether the “economic presence” test of its law (S.B 106) will be the standard in South Dakota. It is very likely that it will become the standard in South Dakota.
But what about all the other states? Since the Court in Wayfair did not formally replace that standard with the “economic presence” standard for all states, each state will have to re-examine its current nexus laws, but this time, without regard to the now overturned physical presence standard of Quill. Although it remains to be seen what the states will do, it’s safe to assume that all states will adopt the economic presence test along lines similar to the South Dakota statute, which specifically requires only a certain volume of economic activity measured by either amount or number of sales in the state.
What happens to all those other nexus standards besides physical presence that have been enacted by the states prior to Wayfair?
It depends. Many of those laws were specifically made contingent on the Wayfair decision. So those would become law immediately. But other nexus statutes like “cookie nexus” do not necessarily have to go away if the states “see those statutes” as “supplementing” economic presence and not in conflict with Wayfair.
How will my sales tax collection and remittance obligations in the various states change because of dropping the physical presence standard?
It depends on the vendor. Large remote sellers, like Amazon, are likely to see little change since they have been collecting tax in those states anyway. Smaller vendors are likely to have greater sales tax collection and remittance obligations. States will now have to write or revise sales and use tax nexus laws to reflect the absence of the physical presence standard. This means that vendors will continue to need legal skills and software solutions to track and interpret both existing and new state sale tax laws under the new Wayfair umbrella.
Source: http://www.salestax.com/blog/sales-tax-nexus-wayfair-post-quill/