This is page 2 of the Washington State Sales and Use Tax Form, page 2 is the same for monthly, quarterly and annual reporting. Since our genealogical societies will be paying Use Tax on Live Presentations, this is how it is calculated. (Note while the Department of Revenue still provides the paper form on their website, they require everyone to file online now. ) The cost of the live presentation goes on line 31 for the state use tax of 6.5%. Line 35 is where you calculate the local use tax if everyone was at that location. I used the rate of 2.6% for the City of Spokane. Notice there are lines for more locations and so if you have people on Zoom at different locations you need to calculate how much of the $900.00 went to each location and then calculate the local tax for each location. Now since the Spokane local rate is second highest in Spokane county doing all of the required calculations will probably save some local use tax. So I did a test calculation to see how much money you might save if all the people on Zoom are in different local tax rates. To make the calculations easier I assumed we had 90 people at the October seminar and that 80 of them were in the room with the speakers (actually the speakers were on Zoom also). So a quick calculation:
80 people at Spokane is $800.00x 2.6% is 20.80
3 people at $10.00 each x 1.6% =0.48
3 people at $10.00 each x 2.4% = 0.72
1 person at $10.00 x 2.7% = 0.27
1 person at $10.00 x 2.5% = 0.25
1 person at $10.00 x .015 = 0.15
1 person at $10.00 x .026 = 0.26
All this work totals up to $22.93 local tax which means doing this much bookkeeping saves 47 Cents! For 20 people on Zoom double the savings to 94 Cents!
And you need the addresses of all the people on Zoom so you can calculate their local rate and keep all these records for at least 6 years. Now do we need to keep addresses of our Zoomers for the government? One option they give in their guidelines is to assume everyone is in the same room with the speakers and pay the use tax on that location, or for us the 2.6% local rate. And for saving of 94 cents this amount of bookkeeping is not worth the extra work.
I went to the Department of Revenues website: https://secure.dor.wa.gov/gteunauth/_/ and it has Business lookup to see if you signed up when you became a non profit, and also a Quick Sign up Wizard for non profits that either did not sign up when they became a non profit or signed up over 5 years ago.
Speaker Bio: Victoria Calabrese received her Ph.D. in modern European history from the Graduate Center at the City University of New York. Her research focuses on modern Italian history, gender, migration, and nation building. Her book, Italian Women in Basilicata: Staying Behind but Moving Forward during the Age of Mass Emigration, 1876–1914, was published by Lexington Books in 2022. The book examines women in the southern Italian region of Basilicata and the many ways their lives changed when their husbands emigrated. In addition to the women who remained behind, she has written articles on honor and infanticide, and on traveling child musicians. Victoria is an avid genealogist, focusing on southern Italian genealogy research. She is currently an adjunct professor at Lehman College, teaching courses in early modern and modern European history
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