Lee County, FLA - While dissecting his cell phone bill and trying to save money, Shane Keith found a problem.
The Buckingham resident found a city of Fort Myers communications tax on his bill even though he doesn't live in Fort Myers.
After calling his carrier, Sprint/Nextel, Keith discovered that the company had made a mistake when assigning his taxes.
Keith should have been paying taxes to Lee County and not the city of Fort Myers, but for some reason he was paying both municipalities.
Sprint/Nextel told us that cell phone taxes are complicated for the carriers.
"Basically the tax law was written for land line phones, then just carried over to apply for cell phones," said John Taylor, a Sprint/Nextel communications representative.
Cell phone carriers act like the tax collector, and add taxes to a customer's bill for their principal place of use.
"A principal place of use is basically your residence, or where you live," said Taylor.
The cell phone carrier will automatically assign your taxes to the billing address of the customer, unless otherwise specified.
"The problem we run into is that the billing address isn't always the principal place of use, some people may get their bills at a PO Box or a business address that is in a totally different town."
Keith had previously lived in Fort Myers, and Sprint said that is probably how the mistake originated. His principal place of use was never updated, so he was paying taxes to a place where he did not live.
"The money should go where the money should go," said Keith, who actually got Sprint to credit him for the mistake.
Taylor said Sprint is willing to do this for customers they foresee as longterm, but it's really money out of the cell phone carrier's pocket because the it has already been handed over to the municipality.
In Florida, consumers pay taxes in the cell phone bills but the carrier hands it all over in one lump sum to the Florida Department of Revenue. It is then doled out to each municipality based on the information provided by the carriers.
"Basically, there is no way to trace it back to the individual customer once it's handed over to the state," said Taylor.
In Lee, Collier, and Charlotte counties 12 different municipalities receive mobile phone revenues which adds up to more than $40 million.
The counties collect the most money, and the cities of Fort Myers and Cape Coral bring in about $4 million each from cell phone users.
The money is used for a variety of purposes based on how the law is written in each municipality. The city of Fort Myers, for instance, uses the revenue in their general fund.