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How does Bell get away with it?
I'm sure it's something most people don't notice, but Bell Canada routinely adds a penny to the GST and PST amounts shown on your monthly phone bill.
If you don't believe it, get out your calculator and take a good look at your last phone bill. Look at the totals and figure out what the tax should be and then look at what Bell charged you. Off by one cent in their favour, isn't it?
I've noticed this every time I put my business phone bill into my accounting program - I ALWAYS have to adjust the tax amount to make it add up to the same figure Bell shows me or my payment will be off by a couple of cents - and you can bet they will ask me for it. Trouble is, my payments are automaticallly deducted from my bank account (Middle-Aged-A.D.D. insurance) so witholding the extra isn't even an option.
Although it may only be a penny or two to you, over the course of a year this adds up to 24 cents per customer. Again, not much to worry about. But multiply this by the number of customers Bell must have, and you start to see a much bigger figure.The 2001 census says there were 11,562,975 households in Canada. If we assume each of them has one Bell Canada account, (and this isn't even counting businesses, you understand) and each of them overpays 2 cents a month in taxes on their phone bill, this amounts to a whopping $2,775,114 a year in extra revenue for Bell.
This has been going on for a long time so the accumulated amount must be staggering. I'm sure Bell is only remitting to the government what they need to remit and not what they actually collect, so this is just extra profit for them.
I know if I charged more tax than I should be to my customers, someone would complain about it. Why isn't anyone doing anything about this?
Filed under General, Mar 17, 2008
Comments on this post:
I've noticed this too and I've always wondered about it. I suppose it's really not my problem anymore because I switched all the shop phones over to Mornington Telco (CygNet). This comes with it's own problems as a Mornington bill is completely incomprehensible, but at least it is lower to the tune of around $60/mo.
But in terms of karma, I sort of owe BCE. A number of years back, Bell Mobility once forgot to send me a bill. It just never arrived and the next one came without the previous month's charges. But when I called them to tell them this, being the honest kind of loser that I am, they insisted that it had been sent out and paid in full. So I didn't press it any further and saved $62.
It will take Bell Mobility around 258 years of penny rounding errors to get that $62 back from me so I ain't saying nothing.
Comment by cobolhacker - 2008-03-17 11:52:03
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