Oklahoma City & Streamlined Sales Tax Governing Board

I drove to Oklahoma City on Sunday for a meeting of the Streamlined Sales Tax Advisory Council and the Streamlined Sales Tax Governing Board. My brother, David, and his family live in Oklahoma City so mom rode out with me to stay with them during my meetings. This was my first meeting since President Pro Tempore Bob Johnson appointed me to the Governing Board. My friend Senator Hill was the sponsor of the streamlined sales tax legislation in Arkansas and he served on the Governing Board.

Tom Atchley, Arkansas Department of Finance, and Mary Cameron, Bureau of Legislative Research, are also on the Board and have been attending for quite some time. Appears I have a pretty good learning curve to get up to speed. There are a couple of issues that concern me greatly that the board is discussing; the most important of which is the idea of compensating vendors for the credit card fee paid on the sales tax they would collect and the idea of compensating vendors for collecting and remitting the sales tax. Appears to me "business" would like to take most of the new dollars that the states would receive from collecting sales tax on all sales into the states. There is also a movement by the telecommunication companies to simply their collection of fees and local taxes that probably should not be involved in this discussion but is.

I did learn a lot and feel like there will be a need to stay involved until some of these big issues are resolved. In reality I suspect that with the finance committees in Congress occupied with health care issues there is very little possibility of Congress taking this issue up any time soon. We arrived back in Nashville at about 10:00 last night and I am glad to be home.