FET Tax Refund 2006 - Called other names on the bill?

[Toni269]

I learned that you can recover a small amount of FET Tax paid over 3-4 years on the 2006 tax return. I can clearly see FET tax on my long distance bills. Does anyone know if FET tax will be charged on any local bills, cell phone bills, or internet access, or cable bills? I don't see the FET Tax line item but many other taxes are listed. Would they call it another name besides "FET" or "Federal Excise Tax?"

Has anyone completed their FET Tax analysis and figured out what the refund is? After glancing at this, looks like FET was charged as 3% of the bill, depending on if you had under or over 250 employees you can recover 1-2% of this tax. It appears to me that we can recover 1% of what we paid out in FET Tax on long distance over 3 years which to me seems like a significant amount. I may be reading this wrong and we can only recover 1% of the 3%, which is nothing and not worth the trouble.

Someone told me on the Turbo Tax listed home line diductions as calculate your bill and figure what you actually paid or take the standard deduction of $500. Seems significant to me for a home user.

Not good with math or tax here - thanks for any help/advice!

 

[donporter]

I did see it on turbo tax. It is looking at bundled services.
Is this refund for corporate to?

 

[Toni269]

Yes I'm looking at the long distance bills for the business because we were charged FET tax and are eligible for the refund. More info:

http://www.irs.gov/newsroom/article/0,,id=164310,00.html

(still interested to know if FET Tax may be called anything else)

 

[donb01]

The FET is only being refunded on LD Services and not on Local services or other. You can go back on every bill to, I believe August of 2003, and add up all the tax as a credit on your tax form. We are non-profit so ours goes on some form 871 or something that the accounting firm does.

I had my LD vendor pull all the data and send it to me - they gave me a nice, itemized spreadsheet and totalled it up. We got just over $900.

Incidentally you can also take this deduction on your Personal taxes. You can either dig out all your bills and add it up if you do a lot of LD calling, or just take the $30 default credit. You have to write it in or you don't get it.

I wasn't aware of the $500 easy way out for corporate, but we ended up with more anyway. Had I needed to pull all that data myself I might have been lazy and just took that instead.

 

[Toni269]

How much was your total spend on the Long Distance? I'm thinking that $900 refund is low - say I spend 15k per month on long distance all those year and 3% of that was FET tax... What do you estimate the refund? Also the $500 I was talking about was on PERSONAL not corp. taxes. Maybe it's different for your State? I'm in CA but thought it was a Federal tax thing that would apply to all States.

Thanks,

Toni

 

[donb01]

Early on we were spending about 3K per month on LD, but renegotiated and that probably dropped to around $1800 close to 2 years ago. We're non-profit and exempt, and our 2 major sites were under the umbrella but they missed the 5 smaller ones. The $900 represents what they were taxed.

Personally, the tax deduction for the FET is on line 71 of the 1040, and if you're not figuring your taxes based on actual bills (and can produce all the bills) you're supposed to just enter $30 as the standard deduction. Being on the 1040 I would assume that is the same everywhere.