Agreed re. contractors. When you use the Uber app, you pay Uber. Not Joe Shmoe and his nice newish car. Therefore the HST should be payable, to Uber.

In turn, drivers who earn > $30k should provide their HST number to Uber, and Uber should be billed HST in remittances.

In turn, drivers can write off HST paid on all business-related expenses.

Yay, Value Added Taxes.

Stripe, Square? What makes Uber different from payment processors with built in fraud protection layers?

Consumers never buy anything from Stripe or Square.

Consumer buy ride services from Uber.

So Etsy should be charging GST and every other marketplace app out there. Uber is a broker not a transportation company. Other than their self driving experiments, they don't operate a single car.

No, Uber is not a marketplace. Uber is a consumer product. Uber designs the product and sets prices. Driver's can't compete with each other and I can't 'shop around' on Uber to find a different deal.

If Uber switches to (self driving) cars that Uber owns itself, how does that change the sales tax model? The product is still essentially the same, the consumer still pays Uber, tax shouldn't change here. The backend shouldn't dictate whether sales tax is applicable here.

Etsy is a general marketplace and should handle sales tax/GST just like Amazon does. Which it does.

Of course Uber is a marketplace. A marketplace doesn't need the ability to set prices individually. Abiding to pricing standards are the conditions to offer your services on their particular marketplace. Don't make up rules that don't exist.

but I can't "shop around" on Uber. I don't get a choice of who provides me a service.

The concept of Uber being a marketplace is utterly ridiculous.

Does Etsy tell people which doodads to crochet, then kick them off if they make different ones?

Uber controls the cost of goods/service.

When I buy a book from Amazon, I pay Amazon, not the seller. Therefore, the seller is an employee of Amazon.

Right, so if you buy a book from Amazon, and then pay your credit card bill a month-something later, that means Amazon and the seller are employees of Visa. Wherever the end-user sends money is the employer; that's it.

When you buy a book from a seller on Amazon, who sets the price?

Just as you'd expect if Amazon was a physical bookstore - the store sets the price. Did you think authors were employees of Barnes and Noble?

That wasn't the question.

> When you buy a book from a seller on Amazon, who sets the price?

The answer is that the seller always sets the price. Sometimes the seller is Amazon itself, and other times it's not.

Very often Amazon

They already support collecting HST (drivers who make more than $30k have to). Occasionally I take a ride and see HST on the receipt, but most are dodging it.

Can your grocery store contractors come in whenever they want, wear whatever they want, use whatever till software they want?

Can a building contractor wear whatever they want, like a ball cap instead of a hard hat and sneakers instead of steel toe boots?

Can a software contractor code in any programming language and on and operating system, whether or not the client uses them? Can he or she flout the HR policies, while on site?

There are regulations about what people involved in construction have to wear while they're working. It's not the contractee's sole discretion in that case. But if you're an independent building contractor and you want to come to work in sequined coveralls then sure?

A software contractor can indeed work in whatever they want, but the contract may stipulate some things about that and not doing so would be breach of contract. Obviously a contractor is bound to the terms of their contract.

In this case the analogy is the contractor using their own computer and software to manage their work process, not terms of what the work product is.

Likewise, if they're not an employee and their contract doesn't stipulate anything about behaviour on site than I would expect them to follow the law rather than policies they never agreed to... Is everyone entering a workplace subject to HR rules they've never even seen?

For reference, the things that I was vaguely referring to are described in detail here: http://www.cra-arc.gc.ca/E/pub/tg/rc4110/rc4110-e.html#facto...

Sure, but I'll only pay them for the minutes when they are checking out a customer.

Should you not be able to?

The Canadian Revenue Agency seems to think that I should not do that. They also seem to think that traditional taxi companies are also not eligible for this exemption.

That is right. The law in Canada explicitly excludes taxis from the $30k exemption, and taxis must collect gst/hst on all rides, regardless of how much the taxi's sales were in a year. Uber was exploiting this rule by saying their services weren't 'taxis', and each driver was independent, and therefor that rule didn't apply to them. It's a sneaky way to charge most people 5-15% less than their taxi competition.

Source on the CRA not allowing cabbies to be contractors? Because as far as I know they almost universally are. Either to the owner of the cab they drive or to the dispatcher.

It's not that CRA doesn't cabbies to be contractors, its that they require all taxi drivers to register for and collect GST/HST- taxi industry does not qualify for the sub-$30K exemption. The reason for this was that otherwise, there were fears from full-time drivers that part-time drivers, making under $30K/year, would be favoured by customers over full-time drivers.

http://www.cra-arc.gc.ca/tx/bsnss/tpcs/gst-tps/txlmsn/menu-e...

That's fair, and definitely clarifies what the person I was replying to meant in a way that makes sense. Thanks.

I do think it was pretty unclear though if you go up the reply chain. :)

If cabbies are contractors, there is still the question of who handles the rider's money.

I'm a software development contractor myself. But I don't handle the revenue of the company or companies I work for, from their customers. So the GST on that revenue is none of my business at all.

Similarly, a cab company could operate such that cabbies are contractors, but the company collects the fares, and then pays the cabbies out of that under whatever compensation terms are between the cabbies and the company.

In that case, since the company is not a small operator meeting the 30K-and-under rules, it has to collect and remit GST.

Some of the drivers might meet the rule themselves. They bill the company with their invoices and do their own GST accounting. Those that work a lot charge the GST. Some that work only little can get away without it. Either way, that makes no difference to the cab company. When that company is charged GST by a contractor, it can probably subtract that from the GST it collects and remits as a "GST input credit". When it isn't charged GST, it doesn't subtract.

Either way, the company can get the contractors "GST free". This is fair when we consider that a company with permanent employees also gets them "GST free".

The "GST cheating" in Uber is probably that the drivers themselves are not just considered contractors, but entire one-person transportation businesses which collect revenue directly from the riders. Effectively, each Uber driver is an entire one-person cab company operating one cab. Uber is then their supplier: they pay something to Uber for the services of being in the Uber network.

If there are large numbers of part-time Uber drivers that meet the 30K exemption, then that's a big loss of potential GST revenue to CCRA, compared to if those drivers were contractors who get paid by a cab company that itself collects fares with GST (even with the input credits they may get). When a driver meets the exemption, the CCRA gets no GST whatsoever from that piece of the pie: not even the difference between GST on some sales, and input credits with respect to the driver associated with those sales

I actually agree that Uber should be itemizing and charging GST in their fares. But I think that's a separate issue to whether or not drivers are considered employees (and I think the law and precedent is actually on Uber's side there, for better or worse). Regardless, as they're providing a service in Canada they should be charging GST.

Taxi drivers (at least in many places,) must use taxi company provided credit card machines and taxi payment processors and then pay the taxi company a fee for that processing. So the taxi company gets the money first and the statement charge is "Yellow Cab" not "Ricky Smith Taxi"