Telephone taxes and out of control fees.

Taxes should be the same across service providers for all services. 

The taxes are as follows.: bill

1. Federal taxes, including the federal excise tax
2. State taxes
3. County taxes
4. City taxes

Did you know some carriers also pass along their property taxes via your phone? How the F@&k is that legal? Well, the rules and regulations state they can pass it along as long as they pass it along to every customer who has that service.

Now for a deep drive into fees. keep in mind that the rules and regulations allow carriers to access any fees they want to, as long as they add them to all their customers’ bills.

1. USF, universal service fund. This fee is set by the Fed and is collected in arrears. Normally, 4-6% of your bill. This goes into a pool to pay for e-rate services. E-rate is a program that allows schools and libraries to get a subsidy from the FCC to assist in paying for Internet. This program covers up to 90% of the bill based on how many students in the school qualify for free or subsidized school lunches. For libraries, they base it on income and poverty rates for the neighborhood the library is located in. While it sounds like a great program, the ISP (internet service providers) charge rack rates that are up to twice as high for e-rate internet. The FCC also requires schools and libraries to apply yearly, which in turn drives up the cost as most ISPs require a  2 or 3 year contract to waive installation charges which cost between $4000.00 and $20,000.00 to bring services to a building for the first time.
2. Florida Gross receipts tax. This is the company’s gross receipts tax. They are allowed to pass this along to their customers. Wouldn’t you love to be able to pass it on to yours?
3. Regulatory compliance fee. They are charging you this fee, which one would consider to be the normal cost of doing business, because they can.
4. E-911 or 911 fee. This fee is actually $0.50 and goes to pay for 911 systems, but most service providers mark it up and keep the rest as profit. Remember, as long as they charge all their customers, it’s perfectly legal.
5. Regulatory compliance fee. This fee is 100% profit yet it sounds like a government fee.
6. Any other fee they want to dream up as long as they charge it to all of their customers.

If you want to complain about all the crazy fees on your telephone, Internet and cable TV bill, go to WWW.FCC.Gov/complaints and file a complaint. 

If enough people file complaints, perhaps the FCC will start investigating all these crazy fees which can add 15-20% on to your monthly service bills.

The CEO of one company I no longer do business with because of the crazy fees they charge  said, well, if we don’t charge these crazy fees I’d have to pay for my own private Jet….

You should note that South Florida VoIP started auditing telephone bills in 1995. During the past 23 years we've seen just about every crazy revenue-generating tactic you can imagine. We would urge you to write to your federal and state elected officials and demand they do something about these out-of-control fees. At the very least, they should be required to list all of them when you sign up for service. They should also be required to let customers out of long-term contracts if they add a new fee during the term of service.