video-blog

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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What To Do When a Collection Agent Acts Improperly

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So, state collection agents are under a very tight guideline for how they are supposed to behave and their behavior is mandated through either statue or through administrative collections manuals or procedures so a lot of the conduct that they have is governed internally. Although you do want to foster a generally good relationship with the agent, some agents are notoriously difficult to deal with or some go off the reservation from time to time. So, if you have a situation where you have a breached of conduct, you’d make sure you want to document the conduct that occurred, you want to get the agent’s name and ID number or station number and then you want to ask the collection agent for a phone conference with their manager. One of the rights that is installed for most tax payers is access to an immediate supervisor so the collection agent – In California, for example, collection agent is supposed to have the supervisor give you a call back within 48 hours. Some collection agents will not do this, they’ll refuse to enter notes in the system, they won’t pass the message along and in which case you are still entitled to that phone call.

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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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What Amazon sellers should do with California’s formal legal demand to Amazon

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Hi this is attorney Sam Brockman here with Robin law in San Diego and we’re doing a special video blog post in order to advise Amazon sellers about what to do with the recent information that California has issued a formal legal demand to Amazon so first a little bit of background about me and our firm we’re located in San Diego California and we focus on state specific tax issues and more specifically over the last few years we’ve been helping Amazon sellers and other online sellers get into compliance with the myriad of state and local sales tax laws and state income tax laws that have affected sellers many people have heard about the recent decision in Wayfarer where the court basically blessed South Dakota’s law of allowing an economic Nexus as opposed to the traditional physical presence test and the significance of this is that it opened the door for California and another number of other jurisdictions who had laws on the books concerning economic Nexus to go forward with enforcement efforts and the recent legal demand is part of a trend that we’ve been seeing with California and California has been getting increasingly increasingly aggressive towards out-of-state sellers who California considers having Nexus in California just by lieu of the fact that they’ve been storing products in Amazon warehouses and using Amazon’s FBA system so in many cases there is sales tax liability, but there’s also potentially state income tax liability as well so now here’s what to do about the recent tube and many Amazon sellers today some of them our clients have gotten an email notification from Amazon stating that.

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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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