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Missouri Supreme Court may force LA Rams to shell out a little more money

The Rams left St. Louis before the 2016-2017 season.
File photo | Carolina Hidalgo | St. Louis Public Radio
The Rams left St. Louis before the 2016-2017 season.

Updated at 5:10 p.m. with attorney general office's having no comment — The NFL’s Rams left St. Louis, but some unsettled business — back taxes — apparently remains.

The Missouri Supreme Court ruled Tuesday that the Los Angeles Rams may owe the state $352,000 dollars in unpaid state sales taxes for three of the years the team played in St. Louis.

The court’s decision said the Rams must pay sales tax on the face value of all tickets sold. The team, which moved west last year, excluded the 5 percent that would have been taken for St. Louis’ entertainment tax for three years.

The Rams left St. Louis before the 2016-2017 season.
Credit File photo | Carolina Hidalgo | St. Louis Public Radio
The Rams left St. Louis before the 2016-2017 season.

A state commission sided in 2013 with the team’s decision to exclude the 5 percent, as well as that Missouri owed the Rams $400,000 for overpaid sales taxes.

But the high court ordered the commission to reconsider that decision.

The lawsuit only dealt with six years of sales taxes, ending in 2013. The commission may need to consider how the football team handled Missouri’s sales taxes in the final years it was in St. Louis, which weren’t covered in the lawsuit.

As a result, the Rams’ final sales-tax bill may change.

The Missouri attorney general's office, which handled the case on the state's behalf, declined comment. The team’s lawyers did not immediately comment Tuesday.

Follow Jo on Twitter:@jmannies

Copyright 2021 St. Louis Public Radio. To see more, visit St. Louis Public Radio.

Jo Mannies has been covering Missouri politics and government for almost four decades, much of that time as a reporter and columnist at the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. She was the first woman to cover St. Louis City Hall, was the newspaper’s second woman sportswriter in its history, and spent four years in the Post-Dispatch Washington Bureau. She joined the St. Louis Beacon in 2009. She has won several local, regional and national awards, and has covered every president since Jimmy Carter. She scared fellow first-graders in the late 1950s when she showed them how close Alaska was to Russia and met Richard M. Nixon when she was in high school. She graduated from Valparaiso University in northwest Indiana, and was the daughter of a high school basketball coach. She is married and has two grown children, both lawyers. She’s a history and movie buff, cultivates a massive flower garden, and bakes banana bread regularly for her colleagues.