Thomas Massie: “Thank you to the gentleman from Florida. He makes an excellent point on the sales tax audit burden on small businesses.…”

“Thank you to the gentleman from Florida. He makes an excellent point on the sales tax audit burden on small businesses. I'd like to give you two examples of companies in my district. These are, literally, mom-and-pop shops. One of them, the wife is the CFO and the husband runs the company; and in the other one, the father owns the company and the son works there every day. They were both subjected to sales tax audits in one State. Let me tell you how the sales tax audit begins and how it ends. So the way it began was with a phone call. And that, for many small businesses, is the worst phone call of their life, of their business life, because they know what they're going to have to endure. So let me give you the example of this farm store that underwent a sales tax audit. He was required to prove that every sales tax-exempt sale that he made in the previous years was, in fact, exempt from sales tax under Kentucky State law. The sales tax auditors will pursue you to the end of the Earth if they think there's another dime to be found, so they pursued him with much vigor. He spent weeks looking for records trying to prove that these were, in fact, sales tax-exempt, because if they were not, he owed the sales tax on all of those sales. How does this kind of audit end? It ends with a white flag. There's no way to prove, there's no way to find every shred of paper for every transaction that you've ever had in the past years, so you finally settle with the sales tax auditors.…”