New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman filed a tax fraud...
New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman filed a tax fraud lawsuit against Sprint Nextel seeking more than $300 million, the attorney general’s office said. All of Sprint’s major wireless competitors, including Verizon, AT&T, T-Mobile, and MetroPCS, have followed the tax…
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laws in the state, it said. New York tax law has required mobile phone companies to collect and pay sales taxes on the full amount of their monthly access charges for their calling plans. The lawsuit, filed at the New York Supreme Court, the state’s highest civil trial court, alleged that Sprint failed to collect and pay New York sales taxes on an arbitrarily set portion of its revenue from these fixed monthly access charges. It claimed that to carry out this plan, Sprint repeatedly and knowingly submitted false records and statements to New York State tax authorities. Brought under the New York False Claims Act, the lawsuit seeks to have Sprint to pay three times its alleged underpayment of over $100 million, plus penalties if found liable. The complaint is without merit and Sprint categorically denies the complaint’s allegations, a spokesman said. Sprint has collected and paid over to New York “every penny of sales taxes on mobile wireless services that we believe our customers owe under New York state law,” he said. “With this lawsuit, the Attorney General’s office is claiming New York consumers, who already pay some of the highest wireless taxes in the country, should pay even more,” he said: Sprint intends to “stand up for New York consumers’ rights and fight this suit.”