About Taxes on your Bill

• Carrier Line Charge or Universal Connectivity Charge:

  Fee that is charged to customers by long distance carriers or by Verizon depending on whether the customer selects a primary interexchange carrier or selects "NONE". Either way, the monopoly network owner collects the fee because Verizon provides "access" to that line for all long distance calls, whether or not the customer uses long distance. It is sometimes described as the long distance version of the "Federal Subscriber Line Charge". It is confusing because long distance carriers, who pay this fee to Verizon for every line "Presubscribed" by their long distance customers, have various ways of presenting it as a pass through on their bills to customers.

• E-911 Tax:

  Amount varies: determined by locality to support 911 services.

• Federal Excise Tax:

  A Federal tax of 3% for most items on the phone bill. This tax was originally established to fund the "Spanish American War" over a century ago. There has been talk about eliminating it in the near future.

• Federal Subscriber Line Charge:

  This charge represents the portion of your local phone service charge that is allocated to providing access to the interstate telephone network. As such it is not taxable locally, but it is subject to increasing federal taxes. Unfortunately, Stickdog does not obtain a discount on this portion of the local service charge and therefore are not able to provide 10% lower rates than Verizon on this item.

• Gross Receipts Tax:

  In Virginia, a special tax imposed on telecommunications companies based on their sales, regardless of profit. So, it is treated like a sales tax by carriers who pass it through to consumers on their bills.

• Local Number Portability Surcharge:

  This is another payment made to the monopoly network provider (Verizon) to compensate them for their cost of complying with the requirement that they allow customers to "transport" their existing telephone numbers to non-Verizon networks. The charge is authorized by the FCC for a four year period only.

• Right of Way Fee:

  In Virginia, this is a tax mandated by the state, collected by either the Virginia Department of Transportation, or a local jurisdication that maintains its own roads and opts to collect the tax. It is used to offset the costs to the jurisdictions of providing virtually free access to carriers who use the public right of way to install cables.

• Universal Service Fund Surcharge:

  This is a charge aimed at offsetting the federal government mandated "contribution" that all carriers must make to government operated funds providing support and subsidies for deploying telecommunications services to certain policy-determined customers, such as schools, libraries and rural areas. In practice, it is a tax assessed as a percentage varying from 6 to 10% (and composed of several components) on the interstate portion of your service, including interstate long distance usage and all access charges, such as the federal subscriber line surcharge. So, even if you never use long distance service, your carrier and therefore you, will be charged approximately 8% of the federal subscriber line surcharge (since this charge is deemed to be for providing access to the interstate telephone network).

• VA Relay Center Surcharge:

  Per-line charge that subsidizes the facility that processes calls for the hearing impaired.