The Supreme Court's 2018 South Dakota v. Wayfair decision eliminated the physical presence requirement for sales tax nexus, triggering a wave of economic nexus laws across all 45 sales-tax-collecting states. Since then, state and local tax (SALT) consulting firms have seen their workloads expand dramatically—more clients need nexus reviews, more voluntary disclosure agreements (VDAs) need to be filed, and more multistate registration and filing calendars need to be maintained. The administrative burden has grown faster than most boutique SALT practices can hire.
A SALT virtual assistant addresses that capacity gap. By handling the data collection, calendar management, and document coordination that surround SALT engagements, virtual assistants allow SALT consultants and attorneys to focus on the technical analysis, negotiation, and advocacy that clients actually pay premium rates for.
The Scope of the Post-Wayfair Administrative Burden
According to the Tax Foundation, states collectively collect over $500 billion in sales and use taxes annually, and the number of economic nexus thresholds, product taxability rules, and marketplace facilitator laws has grown into the thousands of distinct compliance requirements. For businesses with multistate operations, navigating this landscape requires constant monitoring.
SALT consulting firms serve as that navigator. But the navigation involves enormous amounts of data gathering: collecting client sales data by state, determining which thresholds have been crossed, pulling state-specific registration requirements, tracking VDA application timelines, and maintaining filing calendars that span dozens of states and multiple tax types—income, franchise, sales and use, gross receipts, and local business taxes.
Senior SALT professionals should be analyzing exposure, structuring VDA lookback periods, and advising on apportionment methodologies. A virtual assistant handles the surrounding coordination so that billable time is not consumed by spreadsheet maintenance and deadline reminders.
Nexus Review Support and Data Collection
A nexus review typically begins with a data request to the client: payroll records, property locations, sales by state, employee home addresses, and economic activity metrics. Gathering, organizing, and formatting this data for analysis is time-consuming but does not require deep SALT expertise.
A SALT virtual assistant manages the data collection process by sending structured questionnaires, following up with clients on missing items, organizing responses in secure portals like ShareFile or Suralink, and building the preliminary nexus exposure matrix that consultants then review and analyze. This division of labor can cut the administrative phase of a nexus review from several days to a few hours of professional time.
The Multistate Tax Commission (MTC) estimates that economic nexus thresholds have now been adopted in nearly every state, each with slightly different dollar and transaction thresholds, making a systematic tracking approach essential for any firm serving clients with growing ecommerce or remote-sales operations.
Voluntary Disclosure Agreement Coordination
When a nexus review reveals historical exposure, many clients pursue a VDA to limit lookback periods and penalty exposure. The VDA process involves preparing application materials, negotiating lookback periods, compiling historical returns for submission, and tracking state-specific response timelines—often across multiple states simultaneously.
A SALT virtual assistant supports VDA engagements by maintaining a status tracker for each state application, preparing document packages for consultant review, monitoring state-specific VDA portal deadlines, and coordinating with the client's accounting team to compile historical data. The MTC's National Nexus Program facilitates simultaneous multistate VDAs, and managing the associated paperwork across 20 or more states can easily overwhelm a small SALT practice without virtual assistant support.
Multistate Filing Calendar and Registration Management
Ongoing SALT compliance requires maintaining a filing calendar that spans multiple states, tax types, and due dates—annual registrations, quarterly and monthly returns, business license renewals, and local tax filings. For a SALT firm managing compliance for a portfolio of clients, this calendar can include hundreds of individual deadlines per month.
A virtual assistant maintains this calendar in tools like Karbon, Canopy, or a custom spreadsheet, sends advance reminders to clients and preparers, tracks state correspondence and notices, and flags upcoming registration renewals. According to the Council On State Taxation (COST), multistate compliance costs U.S. businesses billions annually; for the SALT consulting firms that help manage those costs, organized calendar and registration management is a core operational requirement.
SALT consulting firms that deploy virtual assistants gain a scalable administrative layer that grows with the practice without the fixed cost and management overhead of full-time hires, making it possible to serve more clients and handle more complex engagements without proportionally expanding staff.
Sources
- Tax Foundation, "Sales Tax Nexus Laws After South Dakota v. Wayfair": https://taxfoundation.org/research/all/state/south-dakota-v-wayfair/
- Multistate Tax Commission, National Nexus Program: https://www.mtc.gov/Programs/National-Nexus-Program
- Council On State Taxation (COST), "Total State and Local Business Taxes" annual report: https://www.cost.org/