This is a first....

One of our forum members who lives in Florida has placed a sofa order with me. As I'm looking at the acknowledgment from Leathercraft, I see they have billed me for the Florida Sales Tax on the piece. I've never seen this occur before, billed from the supplier to the dealer.

Normally sales tax is collected by the dealer from the customer, and only where the dealer has a sales presence, in my case it would be Virginia and only Virginia. This doesn't mean the end consumer is 'off the hook' on sales tax, but is supposed to declare it as a use tax on all out-of-state purchases in the state where they live. Of course, almost no one does this as we all know.

I'm concerned enough about this that I've been on the phone all afternoon talking with various company presidents in North Carolina and right now Leathercraft is the only ones doing this. Apparently they were audited by the State of Florida not too long ago. Still, it doesn't seem right for a manufacturer to collect it from the dealer, so I've also got a call into the Florida Dept. of Revenue Collection in Tallahassee and hopefully they will call me back. The VP of Sales at Leathercraft is also going to look into this further and call me back with more details.

I do know that Florida does stop delivery trucks randomly that are coming into the state and does checks on them, then sends the end customers a bill for the use tax. They've been doing that for some time now and maybe one in ten of my Florida customers lets me know they got tagged with it.

This is very odd, and its something all together new for it to be done at what is essentially the wholesale level in the furniture industry.