Just caught this on the TSPS site. If you haven't been charging sales tax for EC's, looks like you need to start doing so.
I'm not from TX, but remember this topic years ago regarding state sales tax in MI. Products, materials, manufactured goods, etc are subject to state tax. Hourly rates for services are not.
It would seem the workaround to such a silly attempt to add additional taxes to the public would be to invoice just stating an hourly rate fee, and not a lump sum fee.
Maybe a bad idea and set a bad precedent. Maybe just easier to add it to the bill. But the problem there is then it is just another monthly form & fee the company has to process just to stay in business.
I agree.......they are paying you for a report and the report is in the form of the FEMA form. You dont charge for a map, the map is a report of the survey findings. Eleveation Certificate is the same thing. Now if it was a "certificate" for being a nice person, that would be a different picture. Your state association should be fighting this on your behalf.
Replied this to a friend earlier:
"I have applied Sales Tax on Elevation Certificates for as long as I have been doing them. About the only things I don't put the tax on is oil field/oil & gas related work and "tree locations" and maybe some topos that are going to engineers and architects. The Comptrollers office doesn't pay me enough to spend much time trying to sort through everything else or to take the chance that I might have to bite the bullet for not collecting their sales tax. Why are we raising such a ruckus over sales tax on Elevation Certificates? Like anyone ever wanted to do one anyway! I guess those folks that are getting rich doing them have much more sway over things than I do. What am I missing here?"
We Texas Surveyors have been subjected to sales tax in regard to surveys that include boundary location in a most strict definition of the term.
The penalties out weigh the cost of not paying the tax amount.
All my pricing includes the term "plus sales tax where applicable".
I've been ask to do these certificates and every time I was able to show they were not necessary for the property being requested.
🙁
Additional thought. The state is saying it is an insurance service. The surveyor is not providing insurance or determining whether insurance is required. The surveyor is making the necessary measurements (labor intensive) for someone else to make that determination.
Again, I hope your State association is lobbying on behalf of its members to have this ruling overturned.
several years ago our TSPS chapter had some reps for the Comptroller's office come by to discuss what is and isn't taxable. the general conclusion, as i recall, was that anything that is signed and sealed is taxable.
on another note, we had a tax audit in a company that i worked for once and basically got reamed. the auditors dug through groups of time sheets to see how the work was described. we had to pay a bunch of back taxes on topos because the time sheets stated that the crew was "locating the boundary corners" of the topo area and therefore it became "boundary" work which is taxable. "locating boundary corners" was never used on any time sheets again, even on boundary work. it all became "locating horizontal control". 😉
Wow..keep it in Texas..dont need that here in New York....I dont understand why boundary work is taxable and topographic work isnt. Neither should be taxable. With that said, the states will do all they can to get more money out of our pockets, especially in today's economic times.
>" Wow..keep it in Texas..dont need that here in New York...."
We don't have a state income tax in Texas, so they broadened the sales tax base in 1984 to include land surveying. Got a state income tax in New York?
"Got a state income tax in New York?" that and more. o.O