The state of Colorado really wants your tax dollars from items you buy online, and if the retailers aren’t willing to collect the taxes, the state wants them to tell you how much you owe.

States have been trying to figure out for some time how to collect sales tax from all of those sales made on sites such as Amazon.  The problem is that tax laws say a business must have a presence in a state for that state to collect taxes from it.  With online retailers, that has been tricky at best, so states have had to get creative in how they do it.

According to TechFlash, Colorado’s latest gambit is that retailers are supposed to tell you at the end of each purchase how much the customer owes the state, and then do it again in a end of the year summary.  Apparently the state then expects the consumer to submit those amounts with their annual state taxes.

While Amazon is the focus of most stories, this impacts all online retailers, and the idea of every retailer trying to keep these types of records is daunting at best.  Many online retailers are one to two people operations, so trying to add this to their workload will be a nightmare.  Also, most retailers run on pre-packaged shopping cart software which contains no options for this type of thing.

This is going to be interesting to watch, and also potentially very messy.