Hard Drives and Taxes

In your May 2008 issue, you made warm comments about HD Inspector from AltrixSoft. However, the trial version is not really fully featured, as you said, since you can check only the primary drive. All other drives are blocked. Also, these guys charge sales tax on downloaded software. No physical product is delivered, and there’s no way to complain about this. The real issue is the sales tax. This amounts to a 5 to 8 percent surcharge on the price of the product. I live in Boulder, CO. I highly doubt that the company is licensed to collect sales tax in Boulder, or in any other small town in America. This is fraud, and you should look a bit deeper before recommending some of these software vendors.

The Dog pinged AltrixSoft, who pinged SWREG, the vendor that processes its software purchases. A SWREG spokesperson said, “The tax we charge is based on our company location and tax requirements. By law, in the U.S., we are required to collect sales tax. We do collect this and pay it to the state. We have offices in Colorado, Georgia, Iowa, Illinois, Nebraska, Minneapolis, and Utah and are required to add sales tax to orders from residents in those states.”

Residents of some states will have to pay sales tax
when they purchase Hard Drive Inspector Professional online.

So, while Boulder is a lovely place to live, apparently residents will always have to pay sales tax on orders from SWREG. If you’re wondering why you didn’t pay sales tax on, say, a copy of Adobe Photoshop CS3 or Symantec Norton Antivirus that you downloaded—not all states require companies to charge sales tax on software downloads.

Among those that don’t are California, Nevada, Oregon, Florida, Ohio, New York, and Virginia. Colorado and several others require sales tax on downloaded software. As far as the “fully featured” comment, the Dog was not aware that HD Inspector works with only the primary drive, as the machine he tested it on did show the secondary drive. The primary drive, a SAS drive, did not show up when he used HD Inspector though.