Federal excise tax on your phone (a tax time tip)

My best friend passed this onto me and I figured that I'd pass it on to SportsJournalists.commers, who might not know about it.

This year, and only this year, there's an excise tax on your phone. Dependent on the number of exemptions, you can get anywhere from $30-to-$60 back.

The link:http://www.newsday.com/business/ny-bz-taxtips2007,0,2062611.htmlstory?coll=ny-business-promo

The words, for those not inclined to click the link:

 

Rad. Why are we getting this? Did the government fuck up somehow?

 

I'm pretty sure this is the reason why. And for any of you freaks (like me) who happen to save your cell phone bills, you can get more than the standard amount. As a single filer, I would get the $30 by default, but by spending 30 minutes going through my bills, I got it up to $45. That's with a pretty small cell phone bill, where my fed tax amount was between 75 cents and $1.15 almost every month.

 

this is a secret trap to bump your name off the do-not-call list. It's all a big bidness ripoff. They pay $50 and get to call your monkey ass 24/7.

stick it to tha man! punch it Chewie.

 

I think there's also some sort of refund allowed to those that have had a landline phone (with the same number) for a good amount of years.

I'm fuzzy on all these details, but I kinda remember a thread on this part of it a couple weeks back.

 

I just did the math on this, and wow.

Standard refund, I'd get $30. By going over phone bills, I'll get $87.

Cool thing is, the IRS documents say you don't need every single bill, just enough to prove your refund is reasonable. My phone company only gives me 24 months of bills online, which is more than half of the 41-month time frame, so I feel comfortable putting together a monthly average based on the 24 and using it for the remaining months.