Remember hearing about the changes to the excise tax that we all heard about sometime last year? You know, the part where they canceled the excise tax that was created to pay for the Spanish-American war. Well, nows the time to claim that credit.
It’s called the Telephone Excise Tax Refund and there are two ways to claim it. You either get a standard deduction of between $30 and $60, or, if you kept your long distance bill from March 2003 to August 2006 you can do an itemized deduction for the total you paid in the excise tax for that period.
For most of us, we’ll just be taking the standard deduction since I don’t know too many people who keep long distance bills for that long of a time.
So, how is the deduction calculated? It’s not clearly evident until you look at the actual forms and read the instructions, but here’s the breakdown.
The deduction is tied to the number of exemptions that you claim on your tax form. The more exemptions, the more the deduction.
| exemptions | deduction |
| 0 | $0 |
| 1 | $30 |
| 2 | $40 |
| 3 | $50 |
| 4 or more | $60 |
So, as you can see, the deduction should help just about everyone a little. It’s really not much but as most of us know, every little bit helps. Especially at tax season.
Make sure you claim your credit!
[tags]telephone excise tax,refund,credit,taxes,filing taxes,2007 taxes[/tags]
