Different shipping taxes on checkout page and after order is placed

[AlexandruN]

Hello,

I am not sure that I understand how taxes work for a WC_Shipping_Method and some help would be greatly appreciated.

On checkout page

By default, a shipping method has public $tax_status = ProductTaxStatus::TAXABLE;, and when add_rate is called, the following code is ran:

public function add_rate( $args = array() ) {
[...]
  if ( ! is_array( $taxes ) && false !== $taxes && $total_cost > 0 && $this->is_taxable() ) {
    $taxes = 'per_item' === $args['calc_tax'] ? $this->get_taxes_per_item( $args['cost'] ) : WC_Tax::calc_shipping_tax( $total_cost, WC_Tax::get_shipping_tax_rates() );
  }
[...]
}

So the method is_taxable looks at $tax_status:

public function is_taxable() {
  return wc_tax_enabled() && ProductTaxStatus::TAXABLE === $this->tax_status && ( WC()->customer && ! WC()->customer->get_is_vat_exempt() );
}

With the above code, on the checkout page, the method is shown with taxes, based on the tax_status variable.

When placing the order

Then, after an order is placed, the following method is called to determine if taxes should be applied or not:

public function get_tax_status( $context = 'view' ) {
  $shipping_method = WC_Shipping_Zones::get_shipping_method( $this->get_instance_id() );
  return $shipping_method ? $shipping_method->get_option( 'tax_status' ) : ProductTaxStatus::TAXABLE;
}

which looks at the option "tax_status" on the shipping method, and if this is not set, then the order has 0 tax for the shipping method.

So to summarize, the checkout checks the variable $tax_status on the shipping method, but after placing an order, the get_option('tax_status') is checked. This can have different values so on the checkout page a shipping value can be shown, and after the order is placed, a different value is shown without tax.

Is this intended behavior and why are there 2 ways for setting the tax_status?

Best regards,
Alex

[mikejolley]

I think this is a bug and I've added a reply here for the associated bug report: #56931 (comment)

Thanks