Feature Articles
Long-Distance Telephone Excise Tax Refund
Reviewed and adapted with special permission from the IRS by: Andrew Zumwalt, Personal Financial Planning, College of Human Environmental Sciences, University of Missouri-Extension
The telephone excise tax credit was available on your
2006 tax return. If you filed but did not claim this
credit on your 2006 return, file form 1040X, Amended
U.S. Individual Tax Return, using a simplified procedure
explained in its instructions to amend your 2006 return.
If you were not required to file a 2006 return, see the
2006 Form 1040EZ-T, Request for refund of Telephone
Excise Tax. The refund gives back long-distance federal
excise taxes paid in previous years.
Specifically, if you paid long distance charges on a
land line, cell phone, or Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP)
service, for which you received a bill at any time after
Feb. 28, 2003, and before August 1, 2006, you most
likely paid the telephone excise tax and are eligible to
request a refund. The refund is the result of recent
federal court decisions that held that the 3-percent
tax, which was first imposed in 1898, no longer applies
to long-distance service as it is billed today. In
addition, the IRS will refund all telephone excise taxes
collected under “bundled” telephone service plans – i.e.
plans that do not differentiate charges between local
and long-distance calls.
Individuals who are not obligated to file a regular
income-tax return, such as low-income and elderly
taxpayers, may request a refund by filling out the new
Form
1040EZ-T, which was created exclusively for this
purpose.
Rather than requiring taxpayers to dig through 41
months of telephone bills to request the refund, the IRS
is offering standard refund amounts ranging from $30 to
$60, based on the number of exemptions claimed. These
amounts, established from actual telephone usage data
collected by the telephone industry and reflect the
average long-distance tax paid in households of varying
sizes. This data led to the decision to create a scaled
refund structure based on the number of exemptions
claimed on individual 2006 tax returns or Form
1040EZ-T.
Some taxpayers may find it more advantageous to
request a refund using the actual amount of tax paid.
They can do so by filling out
Form 8913 and attaching it to their tax returns or
Form
1040EZ-Ts.
For questions about the telephone excise tax refund visit
www.IRS.gov.
Source: http://www.irstelephonetaxrefund.info/Overview.cfm
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Last update: Tuesday, May 05, 2009
