NEW YORK – Forbes magazine predicts this may be the last holiday season you can dodge sales taxes by buying presents on the Web. State legislators, retailers and lawyers say 2009 may be the year Internet taxes finally come to pass.

The idea, which would levy sales tax on most goods bought online, has been tossed around for nearly a decade. A perfect storm of factors, including record state budget deficits, a new Congress and continued e-commerce growth, appear likely to rekindle the issue. Experts say that cash-strapped states view this revenue, estimated to be several billions of dollars, as money left on the table.

Spotting an opportunity, legislators and other proponents of Internet taxation are renewing their efforts. Scott Peterson, executive director of the Streamlined Sales Tax Governing Board (SSTGB), a group that oversees states’ efforts to simplify and modernize sales tax issues, says legislators from Florida, Illinois, Massachusetts, Texas and Virginia, among others, have recently contacted him about the issue. The plan: to reintroduce legislation as early as January when the new Congress takes office.

The legislative route is necessary because the Supreme Court ruled in the 1990s that states can’t require out-of-state retailers to collect sales tax on online sales. Proponents believe that making their case to Congress would be faster and more practical than wending their way through the courts.

That has supporters, including the NRF, the SSTGB and the National Conference of State Legislatures (NCSL), mulling over how to revamp two bills, both called the “Sales Tax Fairness and Simplification Act,” which have been pending in the House and the Senate since 2007. The three groups met Thursday in Chicago to discuss how to rework the bills.

At issue is how to exempt “small sellers” from the policy and how states plan to reimburse vendors who have to collect sales tax. (Even defining who qualifies as a “small” seller is tricky.) To bolster the need for the tax, the groups also plan to highlight the steady growth of e-commerce and the ways that new technology, such as tax software, could make it easier to collect taxes. They have also drafted several professors from the University of Tennessee to calculate how much tax revenue states are currently losing.

For consumers, such a law would mean an end to sales tax freeloading online. Plenty of loopholes currently exist. Shoppers at Amazon.com, for instance, currently pay tax only if they ship purchases to five specific states (Kansas, Kentucky, New York, North Dakota and Washington) where the company has a physical presence, such as a distribution center. A new law could significantly increase that number. Amazon is currently challenging the New York ruling and declined to comment for this story due to the ongoing litigation.

Ebay, another large online seller, has opposed Internet taxation for years. In a presentation given Thursday to industry associations, retailers and state legislators, William Lasher, an eBay senior director of indirect taxes, argued that a new law would hurt the company’s millions of sellers and generate less net revenue than states might expect.

Though eBay moved $27 billion in merchandise in the U.S. in 2007, Lasher said that approximately $11 billion to $14 billion of those transactions were services or sold to consumers in other countries or tax-exempt entities–thus nontaxable or subject only to low taxes. He also said a new law would make business complicated and costly for small sellers.

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