Time for catalogers to stand up, says association head.
Big brick-and-mortar retailers like Walmart and Target have locations in every state and already pay taxes there, so they will cheer on the anticipated passage of the Marketplace Fairness Act by the United States Senate next week. Specialty catalog sellers and e-commerce sites, many of them small operations, feel that the administrative burden of paying state taxes could threaten their survival. While the National Retail Federation and the Retail Industry Leaders Association have been lobbying the issue for years on behalf of the big chains, catalogers have been unduly quiet on the issue. That changes next week with an emergency “fly-in” to get their message before key members of the House of Representatives who can derail the bill. “The other side has been putting tens of millions of dollars behind the effort to pass this bill for years. But, to be perfectly frank, most catalog companies have just ignored this,” says Hamilton Davison, president and executive director of the American Catalog Mailers Association. “The tax provisions in this bill are not doable for SMBs. We in the catalog industry are going to ignore this at our own peril.”
Davison and his board took the occasion of the group's National Catalog Forum kicking off in Washington next Wednesday to recruit members to fly in a day early and express their displeasure over the bill to members of the House Judiciary and Oversight & Government Reform committees. While the bill contains provisions that state governments must simplify their tax codes for out-of-state collection, the ACMA's position is that the bill as written would tip the scales in the favor of the big retailers.
