Colorado has a notoriously complex sales tax system. It allows local jurisdictions to adopt home rule and establish their own sales and use tax systems, affecting specific definitions, licensing requirements, rates, and taxable and nontaxable goods and services. Compliance is difficult for a Colorado-based seller with an obligation to collect in just two locations. For businesses making sales statewide, it is downright onerous: A product that’s taxable in one town may be exempt in another, and rates are all over the map. In the state’s 300+/- taxing jurisdictions, there are more than 700 different sales tax combinations.

Enough is enough. After decades of various attempts to change the system, the legislature has decided Colorado sales tax must be simplified. Thus, the creation of the Colorado Sales and Use Tax Simplification Task Force — “a group of knowledgeable citizens come together to study options of further simplifying our tax system.”

The Colorado Sales and Use Tax Simplification Task Force will be comprised of 15 members and meet at least eight times between now and July 1, 2020, when it is scheduled to sunset. It must “consider the feasibility of potential changes to administration of state and local sales and use taxes” and report its findings to the Legislative Council in November of 2017, 2018, and 2019.

In addition to members of the House and Senate, the task force will be comprised of representatives of the Department of Revenue, the Colorado Municipal League, and the Colorado Counties, Inc. It must also include representatives from the statewide chamber of commerce and a statewide association of small businesses, as well as from the four most populated municipalities. A sales tax attorney and the executive director of the Streamlined Sales Tax Governing Board round out the task force, which will consider the feasibility of the following: