On the heels of the U.S. Supreme Court decision in South Dakota v. Wayfair (2018) many states enacted marketplace facilitator laws to tighten the sales and use tax collection net and reduce their tax collection costs. The marketplace facilitator laws give states one-stop collection of sales and use tax: one platform reports the tax of many sellers and the state only has to look to that one platform for uncollected tax. Why chase many debtors when one will pay for them all?

The marketplace facilitator laws are still relatively new, and anytime a law is new there will be those that are unaware of the change. So, the State of California graciously passed two laws to provide some tax relief for the unwary marketplace facilitators. Unfortunately, the tax relief laws are buried in the law books and are known to very few taxpayers. Fortunately, because of Miles Consulting Group’s careful study of California’s marketplace facilitator laws we discovered these hidden lifelines for California marketplace facilitators. We have also requested and received from the state an operations memo that was written for the California Department of Tax and Fee Administration’s tax auditors, which we will summarize in this blog.

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