Heads up! We’ve come across a very annoying bug that is present in Magento CE1.8, CE1.9, EE1.13, EE1.14 - but could well be present in older version as well.
The bug happens when you make use of the import tax functionality. For some reason the methods are never initialised so do not apply correctly on the front end of your website.
The easy, but frustrating fix...The easy, but frustrating fix for this issue is to open each method in /sales/tax/manage tax zones & rates and save it. The tax rules will now be applied to your store.
We have reported the error to Magento but have not yet had a response. We presume it will be fixed in the next release but if not, we will create a fix and share it with you.