Texas State Senator Royce West (D-Dallas) has filed a companion bill in the Senate that is identical to Texas State Representative Elliott Naishtat’s (D-Austin) House Bill 1317.
The Naishtat bill seeks to collect taxes when residents buy online through companies that don’t have a physical presence (tax nexus) in Texas.
The bill says that if a company has affiliates in the state, then that counts as a physical presence.
However, neither the House nor the Senate bill has a provision to account for the reality that the impacted affiliate programs simply fire the affiliates.
This scenario has played out a number of times, including just last week when Illinois Governor Pat Quinn signed HB 3659 into law.
Before the ink was dry, Amazon.com booted Illinois affiliates from their affiliate program.
So, no new taxes are being collected in Illinois, but thousands upon thousands of small businesses have been financially crippled. Their income has been eliminated.
That’s money out of the Illinois economy – a net loss for the state, the citizens, and the businesses.
Let’s hope Texas lawmakers learn from the bad decisions of other states. As George Santayana once said, “Those who cannot remember the past, are condemned to repeat it.”
Don’t put us out of business – we are not Amazon. We are not big business. We are not a tax nexus.
We are small business owners and hard working Texans who heartily and proudly put money into our local economies.