JACKSONVILLE, Fla. – Marianne Hatcher said a cross-county sales tax mix-up on her Amazon orders has cost her $300 to $400 over the years.
“I was just shocked that a company like that was wrong,” Hatcher said.
RELATED: St. Johns County woman says she was overcharged sales tax on Amazon orders for years. Here’s why
She was shocked because other online retailers didn’t appear to have the same problem.
She provided the News4JAX I-TEAM receipts from her non-Amazon orders from Lowe’s, Walmart and Wayfair to her St. Johns County home showing the companies charged the county’s standard sales tax rate of 6.5% even when the city on her home’s delivery address was listed as Jacksonville.
But she found Amazon had been charging Duval County’s higher tax rate when her city was listed as Jacksonville. She discovered manually changing just the delivery city on Amazon to St. Johns without making any other changes to her address or the order lowered the estimated tax to 6.5%, her county’s standard rate.
After the News4JAX I-TEAM published her story on Tuesday, Hatcher responded to some people who said it was her responsibility to make sure she had the correct city in her delivery address.
“Well, I guess my response would be that it was an easy oversight on my part, because I’ve never had a problem before. And you just assume that these companies, especially the big ones, are going to get it right,” she said.
A spokesperson for Amazon said they’re looking into Hatcher’s case and reviewing the tax rate for her area to see if there could be broader impacts.
“I was very disappointed in [Amazon] at first, but yesterday after they knew that this was going to be on the news, I got a couple of phone calls and I was very happy with their response that they are taking it seriously,” she said.
On Monday morning, she also got a response from the Florida Department of Revenue that said customers who have overpaid taxes have three options:
- Asking the business to return the tax
- Asking the department to refund the tax after having the business fill out a form
- Civil court
You can find the form used to ask the business to refund the tax here.