The Alabama Department of Revenue now has an online sales tax rate database on its website. Retailers can put a delivery address in the online lookup and get the sales tax rate for the various jurisdictions that apply to that address.

Since the first day of 2014, a seller using its delivery trucks and its employees to deliver goods outside of its physical location has been responsible for collecting and remitting the applicable local sales taxes. Alabama Retail provided members with more about the details of the local sales tax rule change when the change was made.

The Revenue Department had initially planned to make local sales tax rates readily available to retailers early in 2014 but ran into issues with overlapping tax jurisdictions, especially in police jurisdictions, and the reliability of the resulting tax rate in the online database.

Legislation will be proposed in the 2015 regular session that will hold retailers harmless if the tax rate information provided by the Alabama Department of Revenue’s or a local government’s website database is wrong.

This article also appeared on Page 10 of the 2014 Holiday Edition (Vol. 14, No. 5) of Alabama Retail Quarterly .