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Denninger: Bye-Bye

by Karl Denninger

2018-01-29 07:00

Here it comes...

Amazon announced on Tuesday that it was giving information about its merchants to authorities in Massachusetts as part of the state’s effort to collect unpaid taxes.

The e-commerce giant informed its sellers that it agreed to give the state data including federal tax ID numbers and the estimated value of inventory stored in Amazon warehouses. https://tinyurl.com/y8qd84yr

There you go folks.

Look, the law is clear. If you have presence in a state then you have nexus.

If you are shipping inventory to a warehouse then who owns the warehouse does not matter. You are effectively a lessor of that shelf space no matter how you pay for it, whether in gross dollars or as a commission percentage!

Second, if you put half the transaction, that is, the payment, through an entity that is not a mere intermediary such as a bank or merchant processing company but rather is what shows up on the customer's credit card receipt and is with whom you would dispute said charge with, and that firm has nexus you have nexus.

Amazon's entire argument for their so-called "third-party Marketplace" listings has been tax evasion writ large and they have been the enabling party that not only has helped these firms to do so they have profited as a corporation on a direct and ratable basis from said evasion. That's quite-arguably a criminal, not just civil, offense!

The Seattle-based company initially refused to cooperate with Massachusetts, but it backed down after it received a ‘valid and binding legal demand’ from the commonwealth’s Department of Revenue.

Yeah, the "valid and binding legal demand" probably included references to Jeff Beelzebub being pounded up the ass and with damn good cause.

The problem we have in this country is the "oh, give it to us now, and all will be forgiven" approach to large firms like Spamazon while everyone else gets raided, shut down, and either sued or prosecuted (and sometimes both.) The little guy like the multi-location bar owner down here who apparently didn't remit his booze taxes was literally shut down by having his liquor licenses yanked while Beelzebub gets a "demand", turns over the data and is not arrested or shut down despite profiting personally from said evasion -- exactly as, I remind you, said local bar owner did since pocketing the tax money is to his personal financial benefit.

Beelzebezos has literally pocketed billions in market cap and seller fees as a direct result of this misconduct that their platform and firm directly and intentionally enabled, and since they both computed price and shipping and handled the money from one end to the other they could have trivially not done so.

WHERE ARE THE DAMNED HANDCUFFS FOR BALD-BASTARD BEELZEBEZOS?

PS: The "growth argument" for said third-party merchants that all of the so-called price targets are predicated on just went up in smoke....

https://market-ticker.org/akcs-www?post=232873