I work in Direct Sales for a company that remits the sales tax for us. When counting my cost of goods sold (inventory) do I include what I paid to the company in tax?

In any of these sales there are two different accounts you are  dealing with  --- for your own income you have the gross income ( which is gross sales less  "sales-tax" collected ) is reported on schedule-C. For your COGS, you use the amount you pay to acquire your inventory ( excluding any sales tax that you may have had to pay -- generally most states allow a pass through situation where-in you pay no sales tax but the ultimate user does pay on the fully developed  product sold ) less cost of residual inventory for the period of reporting.

For the sales tax account you use the gross sales ( before sales tax collected ) mutiplied by the  applicable sales tax rate.  This is reported to the state but not on your enitities income return.

Does that answer your question ?