Corrections

Simplify Sales Tax logs every substantive correction to this site on this page, and publishes the questions we tried to answer and couldn’t. A factual claim that changes gets an entry here with the date, the page, and what changed. Typo fixes and formatting changes don’t.

The open items come first, because they’re the more useful half. Each one is a question we took to the primary sources and could not settle, and each one holds a sentence somewhere on this site to a narrower claim than we’d write if we knew.

How to report an error on this site

Write to corrections@simplifysalestax.com. We’d rather be corrected than be wrong, including by the providers we cover, and who publishes this site says who reads it.

What we could not confirm about the Streamlined Sales Tax program

We couldn’t establish any of these from a public source. They’re listed rather than buried, because an unresolved question you can see is worth more to you than a confident guess you can’t check. Read the third column first. That’s where the gap reaches you.

Table: the questions about the Streamlined Sales Tax program this site took to primary sources and could not settle, and what each one costs the copy here.

Open question	What we found	What it costs the copy on this site
Whether free CSP services apply in Tennessee, the only associate member state	Unresolved. The Governing Board’s free-service language consistently refers to member states, and the CSP Operating Contract defines Member State separately from Associate Member State. No public source states the answer either way. We’ve asked the Governing Board for a written answer and don’t have one yet.	The pages that describe what free CSP services cover, which say “the full member states where you qualify” rather than counting Tennessee. It does not change the state count anywhere: the program has 24 member states, 23 full members plus Tennessee as an associate member, and pages describing the program say so. Nor does it change what a provider tells you it covers, which is that provider’s claim to make and is reported as theirs.
Which member states permit “as needed” or casual filing rather than a return every period	Unresolved. The Governing Board states that some states allow it but publishes no list. Confirming it would mean checking each state agency individually, and we haven’t done that.	Registration and filing pages, which say that it varies rather than naming states.
A discrepancy in the Governing Board’s own published timeframe for registration processing, which appears as three different figures across its properties	Unresolved. Raised with the Governing Board.	The registration page, which quotes one figure and discloses the discrepancy.

None of these are trivia. The first one is why the pages about who pays for what name the full member states where you qualify instead of a flat 24. That question used to narrow more than those pages, including what a provider tells you it covers, and the log below records why we stopped letting it. We’d rather publish the gap than write around it.

What we have corrected, and when

Newest first. Nothing here has published yet, so every entry below is a substantive change we made to a draft. Once it publishes, you get the same entry for every change to a factual claim, whether or not somebody outside caught it first.

Table: every substantive correction made to this site, newest first, with the page and the reason.

Date	Page	What changed	Why
2026-08-31	The six provider profiles and which provider specializes in SST	Started measuring how favorably each provider is treated, not only how often each is named, and corrected what it found. The funder’s own profile carried 289 words of limitations where the other five averaged 123, and 69 words of fit where they averaged 77. That is a fit-to-limits balance of 0.24 against an average provider’s 0.65. The funder was getting 0.37 times the emphasis the average subject got. The limitation sentences were accurate and they stayed, condensed to the density every other profile gets. The positive section now names the segment the company publishes for, and so does every other profile, because segment was a dimension the site had never reported for anyone. The measure and its bounds are on editorial standards.	A site funded by one of its subjects can fail in two directions, and only one of them was being watched. Naming a provider the same number of times as its competitors while giving it twice their negative volume is not neutrality, it is an unmeasured editorial choice that happened to run against the funder. Both bounds are now published and both are enforced before a page ships.
2026-08-31	The TaxCloud profile, provider pricing, the provider directory, the six compared and how to choose	Removed a contradiction this site should not have been publishing. Five pages, and the funder’s own page description, said that TaxCloud’s public pages disagreed about which plan tier carries SST treatment. TaxCloud settled that question in writing on 2026-08-21: SST is included on all its plans, with no tier condition. We kept publishing the disagreement for ten days. The resolution went into one field of the data file, three other fields in the same record still said to report the conflict, and the pages were built from those three. A separate contradiction on the same vendor page, audit support appearing both as a paid add-on and as part of free SST services, is genuinely still open and is still reported.	A provider is the authority on its own plan coverage. Once it has stated the answer, republishing a stale inconsistency between its own pages tells a reader less than the source supports, and it is the same error this site corrected on 2026-08-21 in the other direction. If a fact is settled, it has to be settled in every field that drives copy.
2026-08-21	Every page describing program coverage or what a provider covers	Separated two claims this site had been running together. A program guarantee is what the member states commit to, and there the count is 24, 23 full members plus Tennessee as an associate. A provider’s coverage is what that company says it does for its customers, and this site now reports it as that company’s own claim. The site had been narrowing a provider’s stated coverage on the strength of the unresolved Tennessee question above, which is a different question. The provider in question is TaxCloud, which publishes and funds this site. The change was made on TaxCloud’s written statement about its own coverage rather than on a public source.	The two are not the same sentence. Whether a state compensates a provider is a Governing Board contract question. What a provider absorbs is a commercial decision that company is free to make and is the authority on. Narrowing the second on the strength of the first told readers less than the sources support.
2026-08-19	The provider pricing page and the CSP-compensated seller test	Closed the open item on Avalara’s “up to 25 states” coverage figure. Both pages used to say the figure was unreconciled against the Governing Board’s count of 24 member states. Both now carry Avalara’s own explanation of the composition and describe the figure as a services coverage count rather than a membership count.	Avalara’s own Streamlined Sales Tax page states the composition: “24 SST member states, plus Pennsylvania, which operates a similar state-run program.” That answers the question, so it no longer belongs in open items. Nothing here asserts the figure is wrong.

The log is short because the site is new, not because nothing has changed. The rules behind it, including what we do when sources disagree, are on the editorial standards page.