Internet Access Tax Moratorium: Revenue Impacts Will Vary by State

A letter report issued by the Government Accountability Office with an abstract that begins "According to one report, at the end of 2004, some 70 million U.S. adults logged on to access the Internet during a typical day. As public use of the Internet grew from the mid-1990s onward, Internet access became a potential target for state and local taxation. In 1998, Congress imposed a moratorium temporarily preventing state and local governments from imposing new taxes on Internet access. Existing state and local taxes were grandfathered. In amending the moratorium in 2004, Congress required GAO to study its impact on state and local government revenues. This report's objectives are to determine the scope of the moratorium and its impact, if any, on state and local revenues. For this report, GAO reviewed the moratorium's language, its legislative history, and associated legal issues; examined studies of revenue impact; interviewed people knowledgeable about access services; and collected information about eight case study states not intended to be representative of other states. GAO chose the states considering such factors as whether they had taxes grandfathered for different forms of access services and covered different urban and rural parts of the country.