Some Newegg Customers Being Handed Tax Bills For Past Purchases In Connecticut

There are a billion (give or take) retailers out there, but there are only a handful of things that one could do to lure people in better than the competition. A lack of a sales tax is a good one, a trait Newegg has adopted for many of its customers. As it happens, though, that’s something that can later bite you, because even if an etailer doesn’t charge you tax, it doesn’t mean that they’re not supposed to.

Case-in-point: folks in Connecticut (via: reddit) are finding this out the hard way. Apparently as a way to scrounge up some extra funds, Connecticut’s government has decided to begin taxing certain sales, like those from Newegg. Here’s where things get really murky: the state is looking for taxes on purchases made not just this year or last, but all the way back to 2014.

Based on some comments at the source article, it seems like purchases that were sent out-of-state were not included, which is a good thing for those who might have sent a gift through Newegg. It’s still not great for the rest who might have spent thousands, thinking there was no sales tax (which is currently 6.35% in CT).

An unfortunate angle here is that Newegg took it upon itself to provide order information to Connecticut’s Department of Revenue, with the customer not even notified. Even if local laws dictate that information must be handed over without debate (which is a horrible precedent), there’s no way the customer shouldn’t be immediately notified. What customer is even going to want to continue doing business with a company that behaves this way?

Making matters worse, Newegg, and other companies, had a choice: start charging tax, or cough up historical invoices from targeted customers. Other companies, such as Amazon, chose to simply begin charging tax, and thus avoided going down the shadier path.

At the moment, this move by Newegg only seems to affect Connecticut customers, but that’s not to say that other governments won’t change their tune at some point and effectively put other customers in the same position.