Alaska Sales Tax Changes were announced on August 30, 2021, the Alaska legislature introduced a house bill (HB 3006A) that proposes to implement a 2% statewide sales tax. Alaska is currently among 5 other states in the U.S. that do not have a statewide sales tax; the others being New Hampshire, Oregon, Montana, and Delaware. Alaska law as it’s written now, however, does allow its localities to impose and collect sales tax themselves. The new bill, should it be enacted into law, would also centralize the collection of sales tax, meaning all sales tax would be collected at the state level and then divvied up amongst the localities accordingly. Moreover, the Alaska Department of Revenue would be authorized to join numerous other sales tax states in signing onto the Streamlined Sales and Use Tax Agreement (SSUTA), where Alaska would adopt statutes and regulations consistent with the agreement. The SSUTA is intended to simplify and modernize the administration and collection of sales/use tax in the U.S., making the tax type more uniform across the states.
In addition to this potential implementation of a sales tax, it’s possible that Alaska may enact Wayfair economic nexus rules, regarding the amount of sales or number of transactions being made into the state, that could require many businesses to register and start filing in Alaska where they didn’t have that tax compliance requirement before, further complicating tax registration and filing obligations by businesses that resulted from Wayfair when it was first decided by the U.S. Supreme Court back in 2018.
To read more about Alaska’s House Bill 3006A, the current version of the bill can be found here on the Alaska State Legislature’s website: https://www.akleg.gov/basis/Bill/Detail/32?Root=HB3006
Whether you’re making sales into Alaska, have people, property, or locations in the state, or would like to know more about this potential tax law change and what your registration and filing requirements may be as a result, Clarus Partners can help answer all these questions and more. Please call us at (614) 362-2730 to discuss further.
By Sarah Sparks