Amazon Tax Terminates Colorado Affiliates
Colorado is the latest greedy state to stupidly try to collect taxes from interstate online sales. The response? Amazon.com has terminated all of its affiliates based in Colorado.
The state’s governor and the legislators looking to collect the tax erroneously claim Amazon is engaged in corporate bullying. In fact, Amazon is logically responding to government run amuck.
The state’s new law would in essence have required Amazon and other online retailers to collect sales/use tax from Colorado residents who make purchases and then turn the money over to the state. The alternative would be to send statements to purchasers telling them how much they should remit to the state and providing the government access to records related to the retail purchases.
In plain English, the government wants to turn online companies into tax collectors for the welfare state rather than balancing budgets and cutting government spending.
This means that Colorado Amazon affiliates will now join their counterparts in North Carolina and Rhode Island looking for alternative sources of income. If you’re a Colorado resident, remember who supported this business-killing law and vote the schmucks out of office when you get the chance. If you need legal or accounting advice pertaining to Colorado’s new law, consult Colorado professionals who specialize in that arena.
You can find out more about the affiliate tax and how it has affected Internet marketing by reading the affiliate tax info at this link. In particular, understand the part about faking your business location and the consequences of doing so.
Business Records: Are They Secretly Destroying Your Internet Business?
When you set up a corporation or a limited liability company to shield your personal assets, that’s just the beginning.
No business owner enjoys keeping business record books…but if you don’t you could still be personally liable in a lawsuit or worse.
Why? Corporations and limited liability companies are designed to be fictitious entities separate and distinct from equity owners. In plain English, they are considered under the law to be a separate “person” from the individuals who own them. That’s what makes these entities attractive for doing business.
However, in order to maintain this separate and distinct status, your business entities have to meet certain requirements to go on “living.” This includes many things, such as filing proper paperwork with the government, paying taxes when due, and keeping necessary business records.
The types of records that must be kept depend on whether you own a corporation or a limited liability company. For example, a typical corporation will keep records of its formation, organizational meeting, notices of meetings, waivers of notice, minutes of meetings of shareholders and boards of directors, corporate resolutions, documentation regarding loans, money put into or taken out of the corporation, names and addresses of all equity owners, copies of issued stock certificates, a stock register, buy-sell agreements, shareholder agreements, and proxy agreements.
What happens if the record-keeping formalities are not observed?
• If you try to sell your business, few will want to purchase for a fair price without adequate business records.
• If you get sued, a court may disregard your business entity under “alter ego” theory and hold you personally liable for damages.
• You could pay extra taxes because you didn’t document financial transactions correctly in the business entity records.
• If caught, you may have to pay extra penalties to the government for not keeping required records.
For an example of what not to do, check out Amazon Affiliate Tax: Jerry West Has a Bad Solution.
What’s the solution?
Have your lawyer look at what you’ve got, determine what is missing, and then clean up your business records by bringing them up-to-date. This will give you a fresh start and you can put into place a business record-keeping system with your lawyer that will enable to you to add new documentation as needed in the future.
Remember that memories fade, employees quit, people move or die, and other events occur that make it difficult as time passes for you to create the necessary record books. In other words, it won’t get any easier than now to clean up your records.
