Keep in mind the source is a utility activism firm/site and is more than a little anti-tax and anti-utility. Having said that, the Utility Audit Company (UAC) has some pretty valid points about how the IRS is allowing businesses to compute their excise tax refund for 2006.

Check out their argument here.

The gist of it is that the IRS method is unfair since it only represents one months of the 41 months covered by the refund and business phone use often varies wildly from month to month, considerably more so than personal phone use. The only way to get a truly accurate refund is to devote time and manpower (=money!) to researching past phone records and compute the actual refund amount owed to the business.

Now, I’m not a tax person, but even to me this method seems to favor the government, particularly for smaller businesses. What happens to that unclaimed refund money rightfully belonging to American businesses? Uncle Sam gets to keep it. Am I the only one who thinks the agency that most benefits from businesses not getting accurate refunds should NOT be the one allowed to decide how that refund should be calculated?