For several decades now, the Kansas "revenooers" have staked out the Kansas-Missouri border, photographed and recorded Kansas vehicle tags at Missouri liquor stores, and made some attempts to stop, search, and sometimes arrest persons crossing the border into Kansas with "Missouri liquor."
Since there is the legal option of proceding to the Kansas Alcohol and Tobacco Tax Office and paying the Kansas tax, it was difficult for them to prove that you didn't intend to do so; but the usual result of being stopped was that the liquor was confiscated and a modest fine applied. Later on, the fine was made equal to the amount of the Kansas liquor tax and the booze was confiscated.
I don't know whether it is still done, but for several years, a number of the Missouri border stores offered to replace, at no additional charge, any liquor confiscated in this manner. They would not pay the fine (or "Kansas Tax"), and you did need to show both your "ticket" and your original purchase receipt. The "revenooers" soon learned to demand the receipt and "lose" it (or confiscate it as evidence) whenever they stopped someone.
With major brand cigarettes going for $38 to $52 per carton in Wichita, the 65 mile drive to the reservation in Oklahoma to get them for $26 to $28 can easily "pay off" even for only a few cartons. I expect stakeouts at the reservation stores soon - if they're not there already.
A similar situation prevailed in Wisconsin in the early '60s where colored margarine was still taxed at about $2 per pound. Butter, at the time, was about $1.25 a pound, and you could get white margarine for about $.90. (Some of the white stuff came with the dye pill that you could use if you wanted yellow, but the few people I knew who used it just left it white.) Colored margarine at the Illinois border was about $.80 per pound, and it was not uncommon for the "grease police" to stop people with 25 or 30 pounds of "illegal colored margarine." They were usually "fined" the amount of the tax, plus court costs, and the margarine confiscated.
In Cambridge MA in 1959-60 I worked with a group of General Motors employees who were "transferred" to Cambridge for "extended study" at the lab who learned that in order to register a vehicle you had to prove that you had paid the local and state sales tax on the vehicle or pay it at the time of registration. If you were unable to prove when, and for what price you had purchased the vehicle, regardless of age, it was taxed on the original "new" price.
Theoretically, it was possible to be credited for sales tax you had paid somewhere else at the time of purchase, but NONE of the fellows involved were able, so far as I know, to get this credit. Since these guys had all bought fairly new vehicles under the "Generous Mother" employee discount plan, most of them were taxed on imputed new retail values about 30% higher than what they'd actually paid for their cars. (Current employee discounts are much less generous, I understand.)
The "legal basis" applied by Massachusetts was that bringing a vehicle into the state, as a new or existing resident, constituted a "purchase" since a transfer of registration was involved.
Presumedly, a transfer between husband and wife, or from parent to child under this "interpretation" would mean paying sales tax at whatever value the "department" chose to impute for the "sale," a condition which has applied in several states where I've observed such transactions.
Kansas will not accept a valuation shown on a receipt for a vehicle sale, unless it is from a registered dealer, and assigns a "look-up" value for purposes of sales tax on the transaction. We even have a law that says they are "allowed" to appraise at up to 18% above market value for tax purposes - and that "tolerance" also applies to real estate appraisals for property tax purposes.