Last updated April 12, 2019
Users of wireless cell phones in the United States of America are being hit with record taxes which account for almost twenty percent of their actual cell phone bill. PCMag.com says that those living in Nebraska, New York and Washington are being particularly slugged in fees and taxes. A report published in the magazine entitled “A Growing Burden: Taxes and Fees On Wireless Services”, was compiled over a period of no less than five years by tax experts from KSE Partners, who spent that time monitoring the local, state and federal taxes being imposed on wireless cell phones customers. In the three year period between 2007 and 2010, those taxes and fees jumped upward by more than three times that of the retails sales rate.
“There is no sound policy reason to tax wireless and other communications services at these high rates,” says Scott Mackey, who wrote the report for KSE Partners. “In fact, at a time when the President, the Governor and business leaders are calling for expansion of wireless service to increase productivity, these excessive taxes actually discourage business and consumer purchases of wireless service and reduce the availability of funds for network modernization.”
The report states several possible reasons why taxes are so high for wireless cell phones, but the main cause appears to be legislators and Congressmen who have apparently singled out wireless services for higher taxes in order to take the burden off of other industries that have suffered due to the recession, a tactic that Mackey says will only change if customers contact said legislators and Congressmen and demand that it do so.