rs-multi-state-tax-compliance-representation

Prohibited Collection Activities for State Collection Agents

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So, briefly I’d like to talk a little bit about what procedures are in bound and out bounds for state collection agents. For the most part, state collection agents are expected to be courteous, they are expected to expeditiously move their cases through the state collections procedures and they are expected to try and work with the tax payer to facilitate a resolution. In practice, some agents are more difficult to deal with than others. It is often times a lot harder to work with an agent who is on a state level because a lot of times there’s not that face to face contact that you have with the IRS or you get a state collection agent who is under external pressures to collect revenue or to enforce the collection action much more severely, that coupled with the fact again, there are very few tax payer rights, makes things a little bit more difficult to do it.

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How the State of California Locates Out of State Taxpayers and Their Assets

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In addition to in-state collections actions, I want to talk to you briefly about out-of-state collections actions. So, California specifically is prohibited by and large from seizing assets in another state. There are jurisdictional restrictions from California going into a neighboring state and seizing an asset in that state. It violates federal law and it runs counter to the constitution. However, what the loophole that California uses to get around this is they target financial institutions and any other third parties that may have a foothold in California. So, for example, if I am a Texas resident and I have a Bank of America account in Texas with $50,000 in it, and I owe $50,000 to the State of California, in California, through Bank of America’s contact with California, can request that that money be levied. Any financial institution, any insurance company or retirement account or anything like that or employer that has a foothold within California can be subject to levy.

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The Good and Bad News for Amazon Sellers

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Hi I’m Sam Brotman here with Brotman law in San Diego and this blog post is the good and bad news for Amazon salaries so it’s been any of you got the email and our where California has issued a formal legal demand Amazon and tomorrow Amazon will be turning over its seller information to the state of California so that California can go back and potentially go after people who have not been collecting and remitting sales tax in California so since this email came out last week we’ve spoken with a number of Amazon sellers and I’ve done a number of consulates with people kind of giving them you know the advice that we would give them at a consult based on their particular situation and a lot of the things that come out of those consults are some misconceptions and some misinformation surrounding this process so I wouldn’t take the opportunity to get on with you today and to address a lot of these things because I think they’re important and.

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Common Misconceptions Among Amazon Sellers

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Good Morning of my name is Sam Brockman I am a sales and use tax attorney with Brotman law here in San Diego and I wanted to do a short video this morning to clear up a lot of common misconceptions among Amazon sellers so I’ve been talking with a lot of people who received notices from California and December and they’re the January 15th deadline to become registered has now passed and in a lot of the conversations with Amazon sellers that I’m having there are some common misconceptions in those conversations as well as some things that I’ve seen that are posted online that are not exactly true or that are misleading, so I wanted to post a quick video to get the right information out there and in helping you guys to make some informed decisions with respect to this so first of all I would just want to give you an idea of where we’re coming from as a law firm with respect to this issue so even though this is a legal issue what is of most importance to most people is the business ramifications of this decision so and really our job as a law firm is to help our clients identify manage and mitigate risk so to the extent that we can’t mitigate a risk we need to manage it in.

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The Truth About CA AB 147 and the Impact on Amazon Sellers

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Good Morning this is attorney Sam Brockman with Brotman law here at San Diego and the title of this video blog post is California a B 147 and its impact on Amazon sellers so I’ve been getting a lot of questions over the last two weeks about the proposed legislation in California which is California a B 147 and what it means for Amazon sellers and there has been a great amount of confusion with our current clients with some of the prospective clients that called us and then generally in the community about what the bill is and what it means so I finally had an opportunity to sell out last night and read through the whole bill and so I wanted to share some of my thoughts on what the bill proposes to do what it does not do and then the ultimate impact on the Amazon community as a whole so California a B 147 is a direct response by California to the Wayfarer decision and what that means is the very first thing that a B 147 does is it expands.

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How Does California Locate Taxpayers and Their Assets?

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So this is actually a very interesting subject and something that we as tax practitioners talk about quite frequently. So the first way that California tracks you is through any filings that you do with the state. So for example, everybody in California files a tax return with the Franchise Tax Board and you have an address on them. So they use the address based on your FTB returns and the addresses that are submitted to third parties like banks and credit institutions and things like that to track your current information. Number two is they pull your credit report. So the same credit report that you can pull through Experian or TransUnion the state of California has access to and they can use it to locate taxpayers and their assets. Number three is California gets data from the IRS. So the IRS has a much more expanded database of taxpayer information and particularly for taxpayers that have moved out of California or might be in other places. The federal government is often a much more reliable and more accurate source of information.

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Tax Issues for Multi-State Businesses

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Hi I’m Sam Brockman I am the founder and principal attorney at Brotman law here in San Diego. Today We’re going to be covering tax issues for multi-state businesses. I want to give you a little bit of a background on my background in order to better do some context to this presentation, so I am a tax controversy attorney here in San Diego which in plain English means I represent businesses and audits payroll tax sales tax and income tax and I help those who owe more money to the government than they can pay, so our firm does a variety of services but mostly we focus in on examinations and we focus in on collections work and in helping companies with compliance issues, so that they avoid those two issues increasingly a larger percentage of our business is with multi-state companies who are trying to stay out of trouble traditionally. We see a very large influx of businesses outside of California who tend to step into California tax issues, so I’m going to speak mostly from my cuts in the context of dealing with California tax issues but this applies to a variety of states California is one of the more aggressive states in pursuing businesses that are located outside of its borders for tax revenue California kind of smartened up to the fact that it can go after businesses and individuals that may have contact with the state of California, but who actually don’t reside in California and do don’t have voting power in California. So California has increased its base of operations and actually has offices in.

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Why Are Multi State Tax Issues a Problem for Companies?

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So imagine that you’re a company and you’re based in Texas and you go to work every day in Texas. Your employees are in Texas, sure you sell products outside of Texas but a lot of companies sell products outside of Texas, and over time as your business grows and scales you begin to have more and more contacts with other states. Maybe you have clients in Oklahoma or California or Florida. Maybe you sell something that requires installation and so you have to send either employees or independent contractors to various states to help install products. Maybe you offer complimentary services. You sell software, you need somebody to help train your clients or to teach them things. Maybe you send salespeople to two different locations. Maybe you have an employee and she’s been with you for ten years and she gets a job offer and she wants to move to San Diego. The problem that we see with a lot of businesses in this digital age and in the age of routine domestic airline flights and the ease of travel is companies start to develop more and more of an interstate web and for a company that’s been based in Texas, that has ownership that’s been based in Texas their entire lives,

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