How about clients that wish to be invoiced to their office or second residence in another destination based state? The responsibility to pay the sales tax is on them and not you to charge them. This is somewhat common here being so close to NY.

Being on the wrong side of insurance fraud is not a happy place.
You will be fired immediately.
Insurance companies are not that dumb anymore.
Those days are gone.
Going to jail trying to "save" someone $500 is not my cup of tea.

I am asswipe. Shouldn't you STFU?

Damn! That's awesome, but sorry about the $1 mill loss.

If the customer wants me to physically ship the stuff to another address, I'll continue the discussion, but they usually don't and the discussion ends. In a few cases the customer has a legitimate address and will use the stuff in another state and I'll ship.

Don't your invoices have two places for address? One is the billing address and the other is the job address. You write it up with those two addresses, thereby telling the truth, and you add the sales tax because you, the seller, are responsible for collecting the tax for things sold in your state.

Clients don't have Buyers Permits, which force them to pay sales tax. We have Sellers Permits, which
a) require us to collect sales tax based on quite clear definitions of location and law, and
b) show that the tax collecting people, like most of us, don't know how to use apostrophes properly.

In my state the tax is collected based on where the service is performed, but not really.
My state IRS can't figure out if I should charge the tax based on location of the client's residence or my office location.
I got them to allow me to bill everything based on my business address which pisses of some of my clients because I live in one of the higher sales tax rate areas.

Either way, if I did service for you in xyz, it wouldn't matter that you also have 2nd home (or just billing address) in another state. I bill based on where the service was performed.

One of my clients is an environmental engineer and told me that my fricken New Mexico is one of only 3 states that charges sales tax on labor (yes, labor, not just parts). He told me that he lost some business because on $200,000 bid, that 7+% does add up.

The simple cure for their anger is for them to convince the tax agency to collect sales tax based on the installation location. Hours and hours of staring at blank bureaucrats will cool their ardor on that issue!

Actually, the fairest thing would be for you to charge tax at your office rate on the products that you sell to them from your office; to charge the tax at their location rate if you charge to deliver,* so there will be shipping data; and charge labor sales tax on the labor done at their address.

I'm not saying they'd go for this, but it sure sounds fair to me.

*Just to be pesky, always make the delivery charge larger than the sales tax saved by this method.


As you should.

Regarding multi-channel D/A amplifiers in my quote:

CUSTOMER "I don't need that much equipment. All I need is an FM radio and a cd changer. That's all I have in my house up north."

ME: How many zones do you have up north?

CUSTOMER: "10."

ME: You have 20 speakers and there is no other equipment in the closet besides the a stereo receiver?

CUSTOMER: "Yes. just duplicate this system. It has worked fine for years."

Initially, because I was classified as construction entity, they wanted me to use tax code and rate based on location of service &/or installation.
New Mexico has 339 different sales tax codes: [Link: rfcmstrd.sks.com]
Can you imagine maintaining QB every 6 months for the 20-30 service calls I make a year?
Now I'm classified as retail/repair/whatever... so I get to use my location's tax code/rate.

In my city there is a law/collection firm that employs a fleet of college kids to log appearances of suburban company vans and trucks, then attempts to collect wage taxes for work done in the city. Professional athletes are charged wage taxes and there was a discussion about going after pilots and other transportation employees as they pass through the boundaries. A/V installers would be a prime target -- if "caught".

Should have threatened to slap a lien on their house.

Also, if either party is audited and it shows that sales tax was "included" or not charged, they'll likely audit the other person and tax both. Had a customer who was a tax attorney and he was the source of a lot of good info that comes in very handy when dealing with customers.

WRT insurance fraud, I sold a nice stereo system to a guy and about six months later, he came in and asked for a duplicate receipt so he could file a theft loss claim with his insurance company. About a month later, I got a phone call from someone, asking if I could connect a stereo system. We were talking about closing for the day because of the blizzard, so I told the store owner that I would be leaving to do this. My first mistake that day was telling the guy I could do it before asking where he lived- I wouldn't want to go there on a good day, never mind during a blizzard. It's a very bad part of Milwaukee and it's commonly the scene of terrible crimes. My second mistake came when I took one look at what he had and mindlessly said, "You know that system is hot, right?". DOH! He asked if that was a problem and I told him it wasn't, so he asked how much and I told him it would be a hundred dollars. He paid me and it took all of fifteen minutes. He asked how I knew it was hot and I told him that I was the one who sold it and it was the kind of system I would assemble.

It was a good day- I didn't die.

I did, but that proves to be pretty much a waste of time in NC, unless you're dealing with a very large bill, since your lien does nothing.

The lien must be "perfected", and that requires a lawyer. A lawyer that will get a very large part of the outstanding debt (33% plus fees), so you end up with pennies on the dollar IF you get lucky.

The same goes for taking the scumbag to court. Yeah, they don't show, you get a judgement. Now you're out all of those costs, and you still have nothing, since you must now hire a lawyer to "perfect" the judgement.



I know a builder that went the distance on a deal like this. The amount owed was 57K. He got $5,700.00 after all was said and done. Considering the time he lost running after that money, he actually lost money in the long run.

The "sort of funny" part of that deal was the homeowner running a collection agency.

They like to collect form deadbeats, but let one of them be the deadbeat, and it's a completely different animal.


The builder did get a new client though, as he build a house for the lawyer he had hired. That was a whole new story, as things went wrong on that deal (Lawyer and wife actually moved in with the builder while he was fixing some major issues on their home).