Phone Fees Keep Coming

Look close at your phone bill this month and two fees might raise your eyebrows, but don’t blame your service provider. The Wisconsin state legislature slipped the fees into your phone bill to avoid raising property taxes.

The Universal Service Fund fee, originally used to pay for enhancing telecommunications in rural and underserved areas, is now 56 cents per line, per month.

You’ll also notice the Police and Fire Protection Fee, a 75-cent monthly charge. It replaces the E911 fee, which was enacted three years ago to pay for upgrades to 911 call centers so that they could detect the location of 911 calls from cell phones. That fee created a $20 million surplus that was supposed to be refunded to cell phone users in the form of $5 rebate checks. That surplus has instead been diverted into the state’s general fund.

The Police and Fire Protection fee will be used to maintain state aid to local police and fire departments, aid that would otherwise have to come from the general fund.

Greg Diltz, owner of Northern Door Communications in Sister Bay, a Cellcom authorized dealer, said the fees are the state’s way of burying the cost of tax collection in the service provider.

“Please don’t take it out on your carrier, take it up with your representative,” he said.

Diltz said slipping taxes into phone bills is nothing new, and pointed to the federal excise tax used to fund the Spanish American War in 1898. That war may have ended over a century ago, but the tax lived until 2006, when Congress finally repealed it. The tax was as high as 10 percent during the Vietnam War, but usually sat around 3 percent.

There are 3,841,745 wireless subscribers in Wisconsin, and 16.3 percent of households are now wireless-only.