actually the BC tax law requires citizens to pay tax on items they buy from out of province. we are supposed to regulate ourselves...

so if you order software or something online you should declare and pay 7% prov. sales tax on it.

a couple of years ago when the provincial govt was looking for more money they hired a whole bunch more tax auditors and went after all sorts of businesses.

At least two of my customers (who were graphic designers) were audited
and had to pay thousands in back taxes, that they (apparently) should have been charging. Except that the rules were really stupid - there is no tax on design unless there is a tangible item, so if you email or ftp someones artwork its ok, but if you put it on a 50cent disk the whole job is taxable, because the disk is a tangible item, this also applied to film, that was output for a print job.

(there was no tax if the customer supplied the disk, and you couldnt give the customer the disk - however if you loaned the client the disk it was ok.. go figure)

it is an out and out tax grab.

(on top of that they also went after the customers who hadnt paid the taxes, so they ended up collecting them twice)

there wasnt much you could do about it, they would go through the books and pick out 3months - find out what the tax should have been,
and apply it back over 6 years (as well as a fine) and seized it from your account.