Forty five states have a use tax. About 1.6 percent of the taxpayers in those 45 states actually pay the use tax. So I figured I’d ask a representative of that particular 1.6 percent to explain this thing most of us are supposed to be doing every year.

“Its a lot of fun,” Daniel Gottfried, a lawyer at Rogin Nassau in Connecticut, told me “I go through my credit card receipts … page by page.”

He finds something he bought from Amazon last May for $22.98. He didn’t get charged sales tax on the purchase, which means he owes the state of Connecticut $1.40 for that purchase.

Gottfried spends hours adding up all these charges in a spreadsheet. He not only has to find all his online purchases; he has to figure out which online sellers already charged him sales tax, and which didn’t.