As the Christmas shopping season gets underway, local leaders are again reminding residents about the importance of shopping local. Vickie Haugen, President of Vermilion Advantage, says the sales tax monies generated locally are very important.
‘’Sixty-percent of the revenues that the city or the county rely on to provide the services that we all take for granted – most people think come from property taxes. They do not. They come from retail sales tax,’’ said Haugen. ‘’And that then initially – fifteen years ago when we started this, just was the message of ‘don’t take your dollars outside the county as much as you can’ – now we’ve shifted into a whole different paradigm with internet purchasing.’’
Haugen notes Illinois lawmakers passed the Amazon Act in 2015 to try to make sure state sales tax monies from shopping online comes back to local governmental units.
‘’With the Amazon Act in Illinois, even if a retail entity is not physically domicile themselves in the state of Illinois – if they have an agreement with a person in Illinois to pay for customer referrals, or if the out-of-state retailer cumulatively in gross receipts has collected $10-thousand dollars from the state of Illinois in the previous quarter, they are suppose to be collecting sales tax. — Are they?’’
And using the fact that Danville General Merchandise Sales exceeded $138.8 million dollars in 2016…Haugen noted how online sales could impact Danville and the county.
‘’So if you assume that 25-percent of that number could have been internet purchases – and you just look at that 3-cents per dollar that I was talking about – we would have missed out on $1,041,228. If most of that was outside of the state of Illinois retailers, that would have gone up to just shy of $1.5 million dollars. – That’s real money!’’
Haugen says for every dollar local residents spend for online purchases, the City of Danville misses out on its 2.75 percent Home Rule Tax, and Vermilion County fails to get its .25-percent Occupational Public Safety Tax.
