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Do you charge sales tax on supplements? I thought it was required in California at least, but another practitioner told me it isn’t if you’re prescribing the supplements.

Chris Kresser:  So it depends on your setup. We don’t stock supplements in the office and so I don’t actually know the answer to that question. I can find out from our tax attorney. But we ship, as you know, we dropship supplements, and that starts to get a little bit more complex too. But you have to collect sales tax if you’re shipping to patients in California. California definitely wants you to do that and we were actually, I had a sales tax audit from the state of California a year or a year and a half ago. And I was really glad that we had been following the rules as far as that goes. We had really detailed records and I just, my bookkeeper just handed them the huge stack and they actually disappeared and didn’t come back. So I think we scared them off. And different states have different requirements. And it can really be kind of a crazy thing if you’re dealing with different tax rates. In California it’s not even just one tax rate in the state. You’re also dealing with different tax rates at county levels. But depending on what service you’re using, or whether you have your own store. or whether you’re selling supplements in a brick-and-mortar location, the answer to that will vary. Brent just wrote in and said, “Gray area.”

He has the IRS code that he can share. So if you want to connect with Brent on that, it is definitely a gray area. We’ve consulted with tax attorneys and it’s kind of one of these things where it’s evolving. Probably some of you remember when Amazon didn’t charge tax on shipments to California. But then eventually they switched over. There are still some online retailers that are pretty big that don’t charge tax and so to some extent at this point it’s a question of interpretation of the law and also whether you get caught. Not even caught, because “caught” suggests you’re doing something that’s knowingly illegal or wrong. But I think some of these questions are going to become more clear in cases where some of the bigger players who were holding out may get sort of either end up in court or in some kind of settlement and then the interpretation becomes more and more clear. But we definitely charge tax on drop shipments to California.

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