Tax & County Surtax Challenge.

[hyper]

According to the US Department of Revenue (DOR), when charging taxes (online or off), you're supposed to "collect the tax imposed by the county where delivered."

E.g. I'm located in Florida, where the sales tax is 6%, but there are many counties in Florida that charge a surtax between 0.5% and 1.5%

How do you accomdate for this?

One way I've thought of is to create iterations of Tax Rates:
6% FL Sales Tax
6% FL Sales Tax + 0.5% Surtax
6% FL Sales Tax + 1.0% Surtax
6% FL Sales Tax + 1.5% Surtax

State on the site that the customer is to select their appropriate tax rate. But also reserve the right to apply the appropriate tax rate for their address, which you can check online, e.g. here in FL:

http://geotax.state.fl.us/dorPubIdx.jsp

While this may be the RIGHT way, I just can't beleive that everybody is doing this! Leaving the onus on the customer and then manually checking surtax rates.

I tested ordering online from a few local sites and they all charged 7% or THEIR local tax rate, regardless of what county I resided in. The DOR confirmed that's NOT how their supposed to do it, but that the DOR "overlooks overtaxing but may investigate undertaxing." Hahaha.

How are you guys handling applying taxes to in-state orders?

Thanks,
Matt

[cdicken]

You can go to 'Advanced | Locations' and then highlight 'United States' in the left hand list and highlight 'Florida' in the right hand list.

Then click the 'Create Sub-District' button and create sub-districts within Florida for all the counties.

In 'Business Settings | Tax' you can then create your four tax rates, and then create four tax zones within the 'Edit Zones' area that charge the correct tax. Within the tax zones, you can assign the correct counties.

Hope that helps.

[hyper]

Thank you for your reply.

I was going to ask what would the customer then see, but I found this in the help:

"These sub-districts will be listed alongside the existing states/provinces in all the standard location lists in Actinic, and they will be displayed in the following format:

State/Province Name : Sub-District Name"

Thanks again,
Matt