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Amazon ?Forgets? to Pay Taxes Posted Fri, 09 May 2008 20:34:27 PDT This post is syndicated from Mashable, where Mark "Rizzn" Hopkins currently sits as co-editor. Mashable is a blog centered around social media news, and is generally regarded as a top 10 tech. Visit Mashable >>.
The Associated Press and the Dallas Morning News are reporting that online retailer Amazon may have ‘forgotten’ to pay some taxes owed us here in the Lone Star State. The word comes from the Texas State Comptroller’s office that Amazon has a secret shipping facility (or at least a secret from the Texas government) located in regional technology center Irving, Texas (the Dallas suburb also known for housing the Dallas Cowboy and Texas Stadium). All this goes back to a 1992 U.S. Supreme Court ruling that decided that state were allowed to collect sales taxes from out-of-state retailers, so long as there was a “physical presence” in their state. According to the AP, Robin Corrigan, a sales tax policy bureaucrat in the comptroller’s office, reported that Amazon company officials “told me that they don’t have a distribution center in Texas,” but promised to I wasn’t able to reach any of my friends out in Dallas before they left for work - most of them drive down the 114 to get back hom - to snap a picture of the distribution center. Someone has made a nice little link to the alleged distribution center, in a custom layer named FedEx Ground. The satellite view definitely shows a large warehouse like structure there - but the street view doesn’t come close enough with high enough resolution to determine anything for certain. There’s another address in question, too, mentioned by the Dallas morning news. I snooped around both addresses with street view and didn’t find any incriminating signage - perhaps you’ll have better luck. The AP also observed that Texas might not be the only state where product shipments aren’t being taxed properly. Sure, we have a big state, and it might be easy to miss one or two multi-billion dollar companies, but after this story propogates out there, you can be sure Rhode Island, Hawaii and other states either small in geography or big in taxation will be searching their phonebooks for a distributorship near them.
© Mark 'Rizzn' Hopkins for Mashable! - The Social Networking Blog, 2008. | Permalink | 6 comments | Add to --- Internet Tax Ban Almost Permanent? |
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Twing is a relatively new forum search tool that launched back in mid-March. Kristen recently reviewed them, and came to a lot of the same conclusions I did this week, as I sat down with Scott Germaise on an episode of Mashable Conversations this week and gave it a good once over: I was happy to see a rather extensive filtering sidebar that's present for narrowing down all of your search results. Modify existing searches by category, forum name, exact phrase inclusion or exclusion, and more. This is helpful in the sense that it lets you sift through the forums without having to read through all of them. I hate sifting through forums in order to find one measly answer, even with Google caching and Firefox's "Find" function. As I said at the beginning of our conversation, too, I'm not typically excited or enthralled with vertical search offerings in general, but just sitting down and playing with some ego searches and some brand searches for Mashable, I was able to find a wealth of conversation that previously had been undiscovered by any of my present brand-management feeds I have set up.
Interestingly enough, through their category selection process and the natural self-policing nature of forums, they've also a remarkably spam free set of results. Scott explained a bit of why that is, and gave me an in-depth tour of the features and history of the website Elite Tech News |
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