OMG -- Wash. State Sales Taxes
Just pulled out the new Washington State sales tax forms to do my September taxes. The form is now 8 (dense)pages long! This is really getting out of control. In contrast, the sales tax forms for Florida (which has other problems, but we will talk about those later) fit on one side of a 3x5 card.
Washington is the worst offender I have seen in at adding jillions of new small targeted sales based taxes. They have become even more complicated than California. The basic sales tax rate varies by industry and by location - and I am not talking about just by county or city but by town. Each of something like 350 towns have their own tax rate. Then there are add-on taxes that don't follow any recognized borders, such as convention taxes and transit district taxes. Then there are lodging taxes, that vary by town but also depend on the number of sites we have in a campground, but of course that threshold number of sites changes by town as well. I have spent litterally hours with maps trying to figure out what rate we collect at for each of our locations. The Washington State tax return takes longer to prepare than any 4-5 other returns we have.
