Looking for creative ideas to handle sales tax complexity

Good morning,

As states look for every dime of tax revenue, they have been adjusting their
nexus rules on collecting sales tax for items delivered into their states.
The trend in more and more states is that if a salesman's shoe crosses the
boundary of a state, that is sufficient to establish nexus in that state.

Another trend is increasingly atomistic definition of sales tax rate. It's
gone more granular than county or zip code as municipalities assign specific
tax rates to very small geographies, even by commodity code in rare cases.
The TTAX field in the EST file has enough alphanumeric characters (5) to
uniquely identify all the permutations and combinations, but still, what a
mess.

A subset of BPCS / ERP LX users sell things to end users that attract sales
tax and for those users, these trends are generating headaches. One place
had the practice of contracting a CPA every January; they'd lock him in a
room with printouts until he figured out what to do with sales tax for the
prior year. That goes from a bad idea to a worse idea when state reporting
requirements move from annual to monthly.

A Google search reveals sources for regularly updated tax information and
that data can be moved over into an iSeries table.

Questions:
Is anyone willing to share creative ideas they've come up with for handling
the sales tax complexity over on the iSeries?
Has anyone written a clever app that provides good functionality for parts
or pieces of this?
Which third-party source for sales tax rates has produced the best results
for your company?

If some iSeries-based intellectual property/code/etc. would be available for
sale, please contact me off-line.

Peace to you and Happy Easter,
Milt Habeck
Unbeaten Path International
www.unbeatenpath.com
(888) 874-8008