? The state of Kansas may soon join the growing list of states trying to capture more sales tax revenue from online retailers such as Amazon.

The Senate tax committee began working on a bill Monday modeled after a recent law in Colorado that would require online retailers and others who currently don’t collect or remit Kansas sales taxes to start reporting those untaxed sales to the Kansas Department of Revenue.

It would also require those businesses to notify their customers on each transaction that the sales tax is due, and they would have to provide them with an annual notice by Jan. 31 of each year of the total volume of purchases the customer had made during the preceding year.

That presumably would give the state more ability to collect taxes directly from consumers who, under Kansas law, are still obligated to pay those sales taxes, even though few of them actually do.

It would also be a big benefit to cities and counties that claim they are losing local sales tax revenue to online retailers who don’t collect sales taxes.

“We believe that there should be fairness in the sales tax charged by our vendors on Massachusetts Street versus what is purchased by Kansas consumers from out-of-state vendors online,” Lawrence City Manager Thomas Markus said in written testimony on the Senate bill in February. “While SB 111 isn’t a complete solution to this issue, we believe that it moves closer to leveling the playing field for local retailers who are at a competitive price disadvantage by up to nearly 10 percent depending on the retailer’s location in the city.”

The issue of out-of-state and online sales tax collections has been contentious for several years.

In 1992, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that states could only demand sales tax collections from mail-order companies and other out-of-state retailers if those businesses had an actual, brick-and-mortar presence in the state.

That ruling, in the case Quill Corporation v. North Dakota, came when the internet was still in its infancy. But it still applied to major mail-order catalog companies such as L.L. Bean, Lands’ End and others.

Since then, though, the volume of retail business done online has skyrocketed to an estimated $342 billion nationwide in 2014 alone.

Amazon is one company that does collect and pay sales taxes in Kansas because it has warehouse and distribution facilities in the state.

But even if a company does not charge or collect sales taxes when it sells merchandise to Kansas customers, those customers are still supposed to report those purchases on their state income tax returns and pay what is called a “compensating use tax.”

More recently, the 10th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals last year upheld the Colorado law, saying it did not improperly interfere with interstate commerce. The Supreme Court later declined to hear an appeal of that decision.

The important part of that case, Republican Sen. Jim Denning, of Overland Park, pointed out, is that one of the three judges who heard the case was Judge Neil Gorsuch, who is now President Donald Trump’s nominee for a seat on the U.S. Supreme Court.

Gorsuch wrote a concurring opinion in that case that has led some to suggest he would, if confirmed to the Supreme Court, be willing to overturn the earlier Quill Inc., decision, which many people have said unfairly limits the ability of state and local governments to collect sales taxes.

“Everyone before us acknowledges that it’s been the target of criticism over many years from many quarters, including from many members of the Supreme Court,” Gorsuch wrote of the Quill decision. “But … we are obliged to follow Quill out of fidelity to our system of precedent whether or not we profess confidence in the decision itself. For while a court may in rare circumstances override a decision of its own device, this (10th Circuit) court may never usurp the power to overrule a decision of the Supreme Court.”

The House tax committee has considered a similar bill. It has also considered one modeled after a South Dakota law that goes even further by declaring that any retailer that has more than $100,000 worth of sales in the state in a year meets the physical-presence requirement in the Quill decision, regardless of whether that company has a brick-and-mortar facility in the state.

“The South Dakota bill is designed specifically to get sued so it goes to the Supreme Court so Gorsuch could knock Quill down,” Denning said during the tax committee discussion Monday. “So both of them would accomplish the same thing at the end of the day.”

Denning said he would be willing to accept either of the two approaches. He noted, however, that after the Supreme Court declined to review the Colorado case, Amazon announced it would start collecting sales taxes in all 45 states that levy them, regardless of whether the company has a physical presence there, because the cost of collecting the tax would be less than the cost of mailing notices to all of its customers.

Sen. Tom Holland, of Baldwin City, the ranking Democrat on the tax committee, however, said he would not support the bill modeled on the Colorado law and would prefer the one modeled after the South Dakota law, or a similar law in Tennessee.

“They are actually just going after these retailers directly, under the assumption that Quill will fall. I think that’s what we want to do,” he said.

But Sen. Marci Francisco, D-Lawrence, said she preferred the Colorado approach because it has already been upheld in federal court.

The committee took no action on the bill Monday, but will continue discussions later this week.