Citation please? Dorsey said they’d be taxed more than Salesforce but I assumed that’s because of where geographically they book their revenue.
Square has said that a quirk of the proposed tax could harm it and other San Francisco payments companies like Stripe. Gross receipts taxes are applied to a company’s total revenue generated from business activities in the city. In Square’s case, those include fees it splits with banks and Visa and MasterCard when it processes credit-card transactions.
Square, which is publicly traded, reports both net revenue, which includes those fees, and adjusted revenue, which excludes them. In the second quarter, those figures were $815 million and $385 million respectively. In Square’s view, imposing a tax on the higher revenue measure hurts it disproportionately.
If I'm reading this correctly, basically payment companies like Square and Stripe are disproportionately hurt because they would pay the tax on the ~2.9% + 10 cent fee they collect even though in reality both companies only keep a small fraction of that fee since most of that fee goes to the networks like Visa/MC/Amex.
As for adjusted revenue, do we actually know for certain that gross receipts applies to net revenue and not adjusted? Or is Dorsey just “hypothetically” spreading FUD?
Gross receipts is all revenue not including any cost or expense https://www.investopedia.com/terms/g/gross-receipts.asp
Jack Dorsey's tweet on this "unfairness" today was the very first time I heard that as part of their argument against this tax. Why not explicitly say that up front long ago instead of hiding behind the singular argument that "we just support the mayor's judgement on the issue?" Seems disingenuous.