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Florida Ponders Communication Tax on LANs
victor_the_cleaner writes "Here in Florida, a little known tax provision may lead to LANs being taxed. According to the article, 'The provision was intended to make sure companies operating their own land line communication systems, which two decades ago was limited to large utilities and railroads, were paying the same taxes paid by those who rely on commercial phone carriers. About 10 companies (in Florida) pay more than $1.2 million annually based on that definition. However, the statute is so broadly worded that it could be interpreted to describe a local area network.'
Internal auditors at the city of Tampa noticed a couple of years ago that the substitute communications service provision was still there and asked state officials why it wasn't being enforced.
And now people like Sharon Fox, the city of Tampa's tax revenue coordinator are pushing for enforcement."
How would you tax a home owner's LAN anyways? Set fee for owning one?? I mean, I own a wireless router, but I only have one computer hooked up. Don't tax my "LAN" please.. This is entirely stupid :-/
People complain about corporate greed, of which there are numerous and recent examples. But on April 15th, I am once again reminded of the neverending greed of governments (Federal, State, City, County, sales, etcetera). There appears to be no problem that the government answer to the problem is more and higher taxes (aka "investments"), nor any activity that should not be taxed.
If we actually recieved value for the tax dollars we pay, that would be one thing. But the complete ineptness of virtually every beauracracy that I have ever dealt with (think DMV, USPS, IRS) destroys that hope. On the other hand, perhaps we should be thankful we DO NOT get all the government we pay for!
My paranoia is asserting iteself, again.
I'm pretty sure they know exactly what they
are doing. Identifying any specific device
for taxation (ie. automobiles) makes it much
easier to keep track of.
-- "It was as if the paint factories had decided to deal direct with the art galleries." - Thursday Next
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
What exactly is it a tax on. Yeah I know LANs. But the article says it will be a percentage. A percentage of what is the question :) The number of computers on the network? The number of users? The bandwidth used? ...
doesn't matter.. they TRIED to do this to my company in 2003, we told them to shove it in a nice way... I.E. if they dont shut up and leave, then we will be forced to DOUBLE the rates we charge florida residents and make damn sure that every resident will know the names of the people responsible...
cince then they have done nothing with it.
and yes, we would have pissed off lots of residents.. no I wont tell you what telecommunications company I am with....
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
They really don't care what the impact is. They just want more money.
No kidding. I'll make a disclaimer and mention that I didn't RTFA, but offhand it sounds like they're taxing private networks like they do public networks which were funded with public money.
Ahem... Let me say this again:
They are taxing private networks built by private companies with their own money.
How can you justify that one? Seriously? That's like taxing me for writing a perl script to do nightly backups of some of my files, or taxing a company for developing internal middleware software.
Or taxing open source software a la the April 1st article here on Slashdot.
Are we sure this article isn't a couple weeks late?
~Dalcius
Rome wasn't burnt in a day.
If they can smell a way to tax something, they will. No matter that this may stifle growth in LANs that may lead to slower growth in OTHER areas in the economy that can be taxed more productively.
Nooooooo..... Let's add a few cents here to their coffers NOW and let us LAN people pass it on to the users as a cost of doing business. Meanwhile, the people in control of the government (and the pursestrings) will have have some MORE cash to implement their little pork-barrel projects to keep them happy and elected.
Remember voting day. My voting strategy--> If I don't have any preferences, I always vote the incumbant OUT. Otherwise they will start to build empires.
Sorry folks. Rant off.
And saying the fee is the reason for the quality of the BBC is flat-out wrong. It's a cultural sensibility, reflected not just in the TV but in novels, film, music...
I've come across this before but I dont' remember where. I work for a State Agency in the MIS department and I asked the MIS supervisor who passed the question on up the chain.
This article is true, but it's in the process of being changed. The wording is going to be fixed.
Abiit, excessit, evasit, erupit.
The LAN is already paid for because the equipment has been paid for and the bits and bytes being sent around the network are being paid for through the electrical bill. There's nothing left to pay for -- and you would think it's impossible to pay for nothing -- but obviously not in today's world. And that's my opinion.
Well, speaking as an individual, it's not very difficult to move from one state to another. It's a bit of a pain having to sell your house (if you own one), move your stuff, re-register your car, etc., but not really that difficult, and legally not a problem at all.
Moving to another country for a job is much harder, if not downright impossible because of immigration laws. People coming to this country have had it easy--our immigration laws are quite lax--but for an American trying to move somewhere else, it's not easy because many countries have extremely strict immigration laws.
- The government doesn't protect from you fire. They might put you out (later!) if you light up, but you'll pay for any damage, and you certainly won't be protected. Firefighters arrive after the fire starts. You can only protect yourself. The insurance lottery and smoke detectors is how you do so. The fire department... no. They might protect you from a form of flashover if your neighbor burns, but what if you don't have any neighbors and in fact have a carefully tended firebreak, as I do? Should you pay for fire "protection" then?
- Police arrive after you've been victimized. Usually long after the fact. At which time they typically proceed to annoy the living shit out of you in your time of misery. They don't protect you (hell, they don't even show up in your neighborhood unless they're going to serve someone with a warrant or give some driver a traffic ticket - police have changed their major role from serving the public, to serving the political trough instead. They tell you what you can smoke, what kind of sex you can or can't have, and in Georgia can even arrest you if you have your labia pierced. Now they'll be showing up because you didn't pay Joe Politico for a LAN you built and paid for - welcome to the oughta-be revolution.)
- I have a well. I had to dig it at great cost. I also have a water treatment system - reverse osmosis, cruft removal, all of that. Why should I pay for your water too?
- Road access I'll buy. Also any other true infrastructure costs: Telecomm, heat, power, transport, defense assuming the government is in, or gets into, them.
- I have a septic system, which I had to dig and connect and so forth at great cost. Why should my building a house make me liable for your sewage costs?
- I quit high school and I have no children. I don't use the educational system (and I'm a lot better of for it, frankly - it's designed as lowest common denominator until about Master's level.)
- If I go to a hospital, I have to pay. I'm not low income, so I get no free lunch. I do have to pay taxes for the freeloaders, but I won't get that back if I am sick. I can, of course, indulge in the insurance lottery, a government sponsored "get rich quick" plan for the insurance agencies.
Looks to me like they're just taxing me to pay for someone else. Not because I cut my trees and built my house.It's definitely past time to throw the tea back in the harbor.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
Is prostitution (where legal) in Nevada charged a sales tax...or is it a use tax?
"Evil will always triumph because good is dumb." -- Dark Helmet
or leases for his or her own use to provide himself or herself with services used as a substitute for any switched service or dedicated facility by which a dealer of communications services provides a communication path
If you have the right statute (I can't tell myself, even RTFA'ing didn't help much), then I see two reasons why this wouldn't apply to a LAN, only to a WAN...
First, no "dealer of communications services provides a communication path" between my upstairs and downstrairs computers. So, no problem here.
Second, even if some company did decide to fill that niche, I could also consider myself a "dealer", selling bandwidth to myself for no cost. Thus, their 9.x percent tax amounts to zero. I don't mean this as a stupid semantic argument, either... If the law considers such a "service" as something that someone needs to provide, then it clearly can't exist without someone providing it (pretty much a reflexive statement). Thus, that "provider" would in effect act as a dealer of networking services. Since I did not charge myself to install my LAN, I clearly would owe nothing (if I lived in Florida, which thankfully I do not - That place has far more problems than just a LAN tax).
Interestingly, on the second point - Since I work as an IT consultant, if I donate my services in administering a LAN to myself, does that mean I could write off the equvalent of one network admin's salary on my taxes as a business loss? Obviously I can't claim it as a charitable donation, but if they can try to tax it, why can't I call it a business loss? It has value. No one paid me. Loss.
Well, that isn't so weird if you think about it. Companies are taxed in most places on their profits; it's usually called corporation tax or something similar. But if the only way you counted profits was to, once a year, check each company's bank balance and take away a percentage of it, it wouldn't take companies long to figure out that, just before you come round to check their bank balance, they can use all their money to buy a bunch of stuff, zeroing their bank balance, and ending up instead with just a bunch of office equipment, then sell the stuff the next month, and get pretty much all their money back.
So, most tax officials figured that it was best to tax the company on the total value of all its realisable assets. So, if you own a bunch of office equipment, you get to pay tax on that too - simply because you own it.
I reckon if you can find a state that doesn't tax business assets, you'd find it would be the registered tax address of a lot of companies who don't even do business there, and that all of those companies books would show that they had very small bank balances, but rather more office furniture and real estate assets than they need just to get their job done...