State and Local Tax Compliance Simplified with Brad Scott
This week on the SALTovation podcast we speak with Brad Scott, Director of Finance at Halstead Bead, Inc., an eCommerce wholesaler supplying jewelry businesses worldwide. Brad discusses the challenges and costs of sales tax compliance for small businesses. He shares his personal experience with the Wayfair decision and the impact it had on his company. He talks about the need for greater simplicity in tax policy to drive compliance and reduce the burden on small businesses. He proposes solutions such as a single audit per year from a designated taxing authority and a single rate model for states. Listen this week as we discuss the need for collaboration between business leaders and policy leaders to find effective solutions.
Talking Tax Reform: https://taxfoundation.org/event/post-wayfair-remote-sales-tax-reforms/
Guest Bio:
Brad Scott is the Director of Finance at Halstead Bead, Inc., an eCommerce wholesaler supplying jewelry businesses worldwide. Halstead is a second-generation, family-owned, small business. Scott has been with Halstead for 21 years. He handles multi-state sales and income tax registrations, filings, reconciliations, and all other accounting for the business. Scott also leads Halstead’s legislative advocacy efforts to achieve multi-state sales tax policy uniformity & simplification and is the Chairman of the Committee on Tax Policy at the American Catalog Mailers Association (ACMA). Halstead Bead, Inc. was the plaintiff in a lawsuit against the State of Louisiana, represented by Joe Bishop-Henchman and Tyler Martinez of the National Taxpayers Union (NTUF). Scott graduated from Michigan State University with a BA in Finance.
Topics discussed in this episode:
- Sales tax compliance is a significant challenge for small businesses, requiring extensive time and resources.
- Simplifying tax policies and reducing the number of audits can drive greater compliance and reduce costs for businesses.
- The single rate model, as implemented in Texas, can significantly streamline sales tax collection and administration.
- Collaboration between business leaders and policy leaders is crucial to finding effective solutions for sales tax compliance.
Quotables
- “There is an equal lack of awareness on the part of policymakers about what goes on within a small business, the challenges that we face, and what kind of resource drain they present. That has been the key focal point of our advocacy, bringing to bear the actual resource that we have to put into this and helping legislators to understand what a reasonable expectation is so that we can comply but also serve our customer base.” -Brad Scott [04:40]
- “If you start thinking about the sheer volume of businesses that are out there, I question how any state Department of Revenue could reach out to all of the businesses in every single state outside of their territory. It's just not a fair ask. So when you start talking about the sheer volume of communication that's not occurred, how many businesses are unaware of the Wayfair decision?” -Brad Scott [11:39]
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