Finance Guide

A sales tax is a tax levied on the purchases of good by consumers. Usually, it is levied at a single rate, rather than a graduated series of increasing rates, although different types of goods may be subject to different rates and some goods may be exempt entirely.

Sales taxes should be applied only to goods purchased by consumers, not by other businesses. For example, if a furniture-making company buys a quantity of lumber for use in manufacturing furniture, it should not have to pay any sales tax on the transaction.

A sales tax is very similar to a value added tax. The key difference is that a sales tax is charged only at the point of final sale of a product to the consumer while value added tax is charged at every stage of the business process when one business trades with another. The business may be entitled to a refund of what it pays other businesses in value added tax but the tax must be levied in the first place before the business applied for a refund to the government. For this reason, value added taxes tend to involve more record-keeping than sales taxes and to impose a significant bureaucratic burden.