Did you pay your Oklahoma 'use tax?'

When you filed your Oklahoma Tax return, did you pay the â€˜use tax?â€™ A lot of folks donâ€™t even know what the â€˜use taxâ€™ is. <br><br>The News on 6's Rick Wells didn't, so he did some checking

Monday, February 23rd 2004, 12:00 am

By: News On 6

When you filed your Oklahoma Tax return, did you pay the â€˜use tax?â€™ A lot of folks donâ€™t even know what the â€˜use taxâ€™ is.

The News on 6's Rick Wells didn't, so he did some checking Monday and found this tax has been with us since before World War II.

More and more people are shopping on line and most of those shoppers pay no state sales on on-line buys. The tax collectors think we should. So the last legislature in House bill 1593 asked that the â€˜use taxâ€™, that's what they call it, be included on line 24 of the new form.

The instructions inside tell us this is not a new tax, it's been around since 1937. Apparently folks were ignoring it, so lawmakers put it on the form to make us more aware of it. If you buy items outside Oklahoma for use here, out of a catalog, online or on vacation, you owe the tax.

Tax accountants; tell me it's either a don't ask, don't tell thing. The client's not asking, they're not telling. They're leaving the box blank. The others just say clients tell 'em there was no use tax, not many are paying it. Maggie Boone who runs an on-line shopping site says more businesses are charging state sales tax, particularly if those on-line stores have traditional outlets in the state.

The losses from e-commerce are pretty significant. Bob Ball: "It looked like about a third of whatever losses we had were potentially due to Internet sales or e-commerce." Bob Ball is the Tulsa Chamber's Economic Research Manager; he says that was for all retail sales in the Metro area for last year, so sales tax losses for that period would be about a third too. Asking for the â€˜use taxâ€™ is a way to trying to get some of that money back.