About the National Nexus Program

Program Activities

• Taxpayer Education and Awareness

Written materials (pamphlets, speech outlines and releases for press, tax publications, newsletters, newspapers and the like) have been developed to provide the public with information regarding the Program and state registration and filing responsibilities.

Program staff communicates with tax practitioners and others and assists Program participant state representatives in communicating the content of the Program to the affected business community.

• Taxpayer Assistance

Voluntary Disclosure for Multistate Tax Purposes - A component of the Central Registration and Taxpayer Assistance portion of the Program is designed to obtain sales/use tax and corporate tax registration of those multistate businesses that have been making sales into the Program states. The fact that sales activities have already occurred in the states raises the potential that the unregistered businesses owe a tax liability for past activities.

The Project staff informs the business or its representatives of the general compliance policy of the particular states involved and seeks to obtain the cooperation of the business in processing its registration on terms that are consistent with each state's policies.

Program staff circulate a standardized agreement appropriate for the resolution of the matter for execution by the states should they desire to accept the proposal of the business. No state is obligated to accept a Voluntary Disclosure agreement.  Each state is free to accept an agreement as proposed, to condition its acceptance on the inclusion of additional terms or the removal of proposed terms, or to reject an agreement in its entirety.

• Litigation Support

Within available resources, the Program will provide legal support to the state participants in the area of nexus for P.L. 86‑272 and sales/use taxes. This support will include the providing of legal research, consultation and a limited amount of representation in given cases should the participating state desire such support.

• Cooperative Nexus Enforcement

The States believe that authority exists for the States to conduct audits of multistate taxpayers whose targeted economic activities in the taxing state establish sufficient minimum contacts to support jurisdiction under the Due Process Clause as articulated by the Supreme Court in the Quill case.  The purpose of such audits would be, in the first instance, to determine whether the taxpayer has Commerce Clause nexus with the taxing state.  Accordingly, Program staff will provide support to states that seek to enforce requests for nexus information from out-of-state companies that regularly and systematically solicit sales in member states.

In addition, Program staff, utilizing public sources of information, conducts research to identify multistate companies that may have compliance issues in member states, evaluates the results of that research and takes appropriate action as a result of the research.  Appropriate actions can range from no further action, to referrals to individual states, to referral to the Nexus, Audit and/or Executive Committees to authorize cooperative enforcement in select cases.

Depending on the availability of resources, Program staff can refer an audit to the Audit Program, the purpose of which will be to determine whether a multistate business has established nexus in Program states.  The Program will finance the costs of such audits, through the determination of whether or not nexus exists.  Assuming nexus exists, assessments may be issued for those participating states that are members of both the Nexus and the Audit programs.