The Joplin Globe, Joplin, MO

Carthage, Jasper County

Discussion

March 9, 2010

Phone customers seeing added tax on monthly bills

By Debby Woodin

dwoodin@joplinglobe.com

Now that Missouri cities have received settlements from AT&T; for taxes that were in contention, customers are seeing the cost added to their telephone bills.

Residential customers in the Joplin area are paying up to $1.99 a month more as a gross receipts tax, according to Kerry Hibbs, spokesman for AT&T.; Hibbs said the charge was added to bills beginning in January.

Consumers have always paid a gross receipts tax on local telephone service, he said. But now consumers are having to catch up with taxes that the company has to pay on access charges and certain long-distance services for which it had not been charging.

About 270 Missouri cities had joined the city of Springfield in filing a lawsuit against AT&T.;

“They decided they should collect taxes on certain telecom services that they had not previously taxed; that’s what set the whole thing off,” Hibbs said of the lawsuit. In particular, taxes on certain types of long-distance calls were at issue.

AT&T; has paid the cities their shares of the settlement and now is charging customers to recoup the payout. “Those are the back taxes that AT&T; is collecting from customers,” Hibbs said.

He said the charges to customers range from 59 cents to $1.99 monthly, depending on how long the customer has had a land-line telephone. The phone company is collecting from people who have been customers since 1999. The charge will remain on bills for four years.

In addition to paying the settlement, AT&T; paid $16 million in attorney fees that it is not recouping from customers, Hibbs said.

He said the settlement is not the same one that cities have collected from a similar issue with cell phones.

Brian Head, Joplin’s city attorney, said cities are not forcing customers to pay twice.

“AT&T; wasn’t charging the tax,” he said. “So I guess everybody is paying the tax they didn’t pay back then.”

Head said the lawsuit over home phones was separate from one filed against cell-phone companies.

Leslie Jones, Joplin’s finance director, said the city received $982,671.73 on Dec. 28 in the settlement of the AT&T; land-line lawsuit. She said she has received telephone calls from residents questioning the new charge on their phone bills.

Carthage received $188,635, and Neosho got about $178,000.





Cell-phone pay

Joplin also received $2.175 million last year from various cell-phone companies as a settlement of taxes that were to be collected on those services.

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