Kansas legislators are right to seek new avenues to recoup sales taxes from online retailers. The seismic shift toward online purchases poses a serious threat to tax revenues if the issue is not addressed.

Online sales in the U.S. totaled an estimated $394.9 billion in 2016, up 15 percent from 2015, the U.S. Department of Commerce reported. Online sales now account for nearly 10 percent of all retail sales. And the rapid increase is expected to continue.

That increase in online sales has a two-fold economic impact on sales tax collections for the state, its counties and its cities. Current law, developed nearly 20 years ago, only requires that businesses with a physical presence in Kansas collect and remit sales taxes on online purchases. So, in many online transactions, local and state sales taxes are not collected, giving online businesses an unfair price advantage over brick-and-mortar businesses that do collect and pay such taxes.

This week, the Senate tax committee started work on a bill designed to rectify the issue. Senate Bill 111 would require online retailers and others who don’t collect or remit Kansas sales taxes to report those untaxed sales to the Kansas Department of Revenue and to notify their customers on each transaction that the sales tax is due. The bill also would require online businesses to provide all customers with an annual notice of the total volume of purchases the customer made during the preceding year.

The bill is modeled after a Colorado law designed to force online retailers’ hands. Many online retailers have found it less expensive to collect and remit sales taxes rather than comply with the stringent reporting law. The Colorado law has been upheld by the 10th Circuit Court of Appeals.

“We believe that there should be fairness in the sales tax charged by our vendors on Massachusetts Street versus what is purchased by Kansas consumers from out-of-state vendors online,” Lawrence City Manager Thomas Markus said in written testimony. “While SB 111 isn’t a complete solution to this issue, we believe that it moves closer to leveling the playing field for local retailers who are at a competitive price disadvantage by up to nearly 10 percent depending on the retailer’s location in the city.”

In the meantime, the Kansas House tax committee is considering a bill modeled after a South Dakota law declaring that any retailer with more than $100,000 worth of annual sales in the state meets the physical-presence requirement, regardless of whether that company has a facility in the state. Advocates of the House approach believe such a ruling will be tested in court and will prevail.

Markus is right. The playing field should be level when it comes to sales taxes. Local businesses have made investments in their communities that their online competitors have not. It’s wholly unfair that local shops collect and remit a tax that online competitors can ignore. Hopefully, lawmakers can coalesce behind one of the Kansas strategies to fix the sales tax issue.