PST

Are cloud computing services subject to provincial sales tax? According to a recent decision of the BC Supreme Court in Hootsuite Inc. v British Columbia (Finance), 2023 BCSC 358 the cloud computing services AWS Support, EC2 and S3, and AWS direct connect are not subject to provincial sales tax under the  Provincial Sales Tax Act, S.B.C. 2012, c. 35 [PSTA]. In short, these services are not taxable as, depending on the service, they are not the purchase of software programs, they constitute the purchase of on-demand infrastructure (IaaS), the service does not contain a software program, the software program is not used in BC, the service is not used in BC, or the service is otherwise exempt under incidental exemptions in the PSTA.…