States will be able to force more people to pay sales tax when they make online purchases under a Supreme Court decision that will leave shoppers with lighter wallets but is a big financial win for states, The Associated Press reported. Consumers can expect to see sales tax charged on more online purchases — likely over the next year and potentially before the Christmas shopping season — as states and retailers react to the court’s decision, said one attorney involved in the case. The Supreme Court’s 5-4 opinion overruled a pair of decades-old decisions that states said cost them billions of dollars in lost revenue annually. The decisions made it more difficult for states to collect sales tax on certain online purchases, and more than 40 states had asked the high court for action. Five states don’t charge sales tax. The cases the court overturned said that if a business was shipping a customer’s purchase to a state where the business didn’t have a physical presence such as a warehouse or office, the business didn’t have to collect sales tax for the state. Customers were generally responsible for paying the sales tax to the state themselves if they weren’t charged it, but most didn’t realize they owed it and few paid. Justice Anthony Kennedy wrote that the previous decisions were flawed. “Each year the physical presence rule becomes further removed from economic reality and results in significant revenue losses to the States,” he wrote in an opinion joined by Justices Clarence Thomas, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Samuel Alito and Neil Gorsuch. Justice Kennedy wrote that the rule “limited States’ ability to seek long-term prosperity and has prevented market participants from competing on an even playing field.” The ruling is a victory for big chains with a presence in many states, since they usually collect sales tax on online purchases already. Now, rivals will be charging sales tax where they hadn’t before. Sellers that use eBay and Etsy, which provide platforms for smaller sellers, also haven’t been collecting sales tax nationwide. The case is South Dakota v. Wayfair, 17-494.

The Supreme Court said yesterday that the in-house Securities and Exchange Commission judge who handled the case of investment advisor Raymond Lucia was a constitutional "officer," meaning he should have been directly appointed by the SEC, Bloomberg News reported. Lucia had been fined $300,000 by the SEC judge and barred from working as an investment adviser. Writing for six justices in the majority, Justice Elena Kagan said Lucia was entitled to a new hearing before a different judge or the commission itself. The ruling could affect about 100 cases currently at the SEC, along with a dozen that are on appeal in the federal courts. It also could affect hearing systems at other government agencies, including the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. and the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, which have similar systems for appointing what are known as administrative law judges. The Constitution requires that officers, as opposed to mere employees, be appointed by the president, a department head or a court. The SEC’s judges were selected by the chief judge and approved by the commission’s personnel office. The commission has five administrative law judges, including the chief judge. The Trump administration took the unusual step of backing Lucia at the high court and arguing that the SEC’s appointment process for judges was unconstitutional. That was a shift for the federal government, which had previously contended that agency judges lacked enough authority to be considered officers. The administration, however, disagreed with Lucia about the practical implications of the constitutional issue, saying the commission has retroactively fixed the problem by ratifying the judges’ appointments itself.