Sales and Use Tax (SUT)

As of March 5, 2008, the AlternaTax software has been acquired by KPMG LLP. For more information about KPMG and AlternaTax, please visit http://alternatax.kpmg.com. KPMG LLP, the audit, tax and advisory firm (www.us.kpmg.com) is the U.S. member firm of KPMG International. KPMG International's member firms have 123,000 professionals, including 7,100 partners, in 145 countries.

The term "Sales Tax" actually refers to several tax acts. Sales tax is a combination of "occupation" taxes that are imposed on sellers' receipts and "use" taxes that are imposed on amounts paid by purchasers. Sellers owe the occupation tax to the department; they reimburse themselves for this liability by collecting use tax from the buyers. "Sales tax" is the combination of all state, local, mass transit, water commission, home rule occupation and use, non-home rule occupation and use, park district, and county public safety taxes. Sales tax is imposed on a seller's receipts from sales of tangible personal property for use or consumption. Tangible personal property does not include real estate, stocks, bonds, or other "paper" assets representing an interest. If the seller (typically an out-of-state business, such as a catalog company or a retailer making sales on the Internet) does not charge Sales Tax, the purchaser must pay the tax directly to the department.

"Use Tax" is a tax on the storing, using, consuming, and sometimes distributing tangible personal property or providing a taxable service. In other words, you will be subject to the use tax in the state where that event occurs. A use tax is considered a compensating tax or complementary tax. This means the use tax is assessed and due on the property or taxable service when the sales tax has not been paid.

AlternaDev offers solutions to manage your Sales and Use Tax Returns. You can license our AlternaTax Sales Tax Compliance Software to use in-house and automate the tax preparation process, while managing the tax compliance on your own. For those that do not want to manage tax compliance in-house, AlternaDev offers an outsourced tax compliance service. With this service, you can outsource the services of AlternaDev to manage, prepare and file your sales and use tax returns.