#2949 - Better tax handling

Identifier #2949
Issue type Feature request or suggestion
Title Better tax handling
Status Closed (duplicate)
Handling member Chris Graham
Addon ecommerce
Description Currently we don't do tax handling well at all.

In a US store everyone paying in the same state as the store must pay tax.
In an EU store everyone must pay tax if they are in the EU, unless that are registered for VAT themselves in which case they must give a VAT number.

For the shopping cart you define tax in the system, and you can allow users to opt-out if they're not liable for tax. The tax that was charged for is included in the order history.

For everything else we're relying on tax being charged by the payment gateway correctly, where the records would be kept.

This is very complex and could be improved in many ways:
- Instead of having a tax opt-out checkbox, have proper processing rules to determine if tax is liable based on location
- For the EU have a feature to enter a VAT number to opt-out of tax (this isn't so important, as companies can just get a rebate instead of initially opting-out)
- For all products workout the tax, charge it, and record it with the transactions, and allow that to be downloaded in a CSV (i.e. take away the responsibility from the payment gateway).
Steps to reproduce

Additional information This needs documenting too.

Right now I think people are not suffering tax problems because:
1) In the US nobody is really auditing small online stores for sales tax, it's rather lawless here, and especially difficult due to the state-line rule about not charging taxes (so nobody is going to go check all that)
2) In the EU there's a VAT threshold, so it doesn't apply to micro-businesses
3) In the EU those over the VAT threshold are probably still mostly only serving EU customers, so can just calculate the tax easily from the transactions - and if some people are charged tax who didn't need to be, it would just be paid to the taxman anyway (who wouldn't complain).
4) People are rarely (if ever) having both the shopping cart, and usergroup subscriptions, so relying on either the cart tax calculation, or the payment gateway's own calculation, is sufficient.

I don't like all the caveats of this. One good unified integrated system would be much better.
Related to

#3063 - Sales tax: Buyer-origin tax rules
Funded? No
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