Mike BellNASHVILLE – Beer and tobacco retailers in Tennessee coughed up some $60 million in previously unreported sales tax revenue in the first 30 months of a state program cracking down on sales tax compliance, officials say.
The Retail Accountability Program, approved by state lawmakers in 2012, requires beer and tobacco wholesalers to report sales, which are then compared to retailers’ tax returns.
That’s helped uncover both deliberate tax cheats and honest mistakes, say officials who call the RAP a great success.
But plans by the Department of Revenue to extend the RAP compliance effort to a broad array of other items is generating a, well, flap. And a powerful coalition of statewide business associations is pushing a scrap-the-RAP-expansion bill that also imposes a formal rule-making process on the original program.
“We are for rolling back the expansion that got passed in 2015,” said Bob Ikard, president of the Tennessee Grocers & Convenience Store Association. “It was sold by the Department of Revenue as an opportunity to take a closer look at items that are sold in convenience stores or beer and tobacco stores.”