Telecommunication companies, including cable companies and others that bill for communication services, are required to charge taxes and fees imposed on telecommunication services: sales taxes, state gross receipts taxes, local telecommunications taxes, federal universal fund fees, state universal service fund fees, and 911 fees. Billing and remitting these taxes and fees can be very complex on their part. That complexity can lead to inaccurate billing, and contract non-compliance with you, as their client. You do have rights in this situation, but you need to know where to look, and what to look for. Your company may be eligible for exemptions or refunds of overpayments of tax on access charges and certain telecommunications equipment purchases.
The first step to determining if you have an opportunity to recover costs is to ask your IT department or Vendor Management team for a recent telecom inventory. Verifying your current inventory to know what you are being charged for, and where it is located can uncover some easy to identify opportunities. To properly account for less obvious opportunities, your business needs a full 3rd party vendor expense management audit, including refund tax, tariff, with complete telecom services. As part of this audit, refund investigations should be initiated. The goal is to locate tariff mistakes, and contract non-compliance as well. Locating a billing error is not just tariff and tax investigation it’s much deeper than that. Having an expert 3rd party perform this audit is the best way to identify potential savings. If your team lead has never seen or identified a telecom, data, wireless, VOIP, or phone billing error, how can they be expected to know where to look on your bill to possibly find it?
Some refunds won’t be obtained without deeper tariff knowledge and telecom tax training. The historical telecom refunds from older invoices require years of bill auditing expertise, not just common sense analysis. Additionally, larger scale refunds require deeper knowledge. Most of these telecom refunds remain hidden within your telecom invoices. Identifying greater refunds require a lot of drill down calculations and have many factors. If your telecom team is like most, they are busy keeping your services operational and functioning properly. They are constantly adding new locations, new equipment, and working on core jobs. Ensuring contract compliance, and staying current on taxes and fees is not something they look at regularly
Simply put, you can’t expect employees without the proper experience to determine if federal, state and local taxes and surcharges were billed correctly, as the billing statements are complex and confusing. If telecom audits were simple, everyone would do them.
About Limitless Technology
Limitless Technology, LLC has been managing complex indirect spend and vendor documentation since 2006 for some of the largest companies in the USA saving them millions in costs.
Through our Billing Optimization and Vendor Management Solutions proprietary platforms we utilize technology, processes, expertise, time, and resources to improve our client’s bottom-line.
Limitless Technology manages your vendors, so you can manage and grow your business.
For Additional Information Contact us at:
Phone: 407.330.4466
