Know Your Phone Bill

If you're like most people, you usually just pay your phone bill each month without looking too closely at the detailed charges. Not understanding what you are paying for could make you a prime candidate for cramming, slamming or any number of other fraudulent billing practices.

In many cases, the confusing terms and difficult to understand charges are to blame for many consumers' lax attitudes toward their telephone bills. It's simply too time consuming to figure out each and every term. However, knowing the following terms will help you decipher your phone bill and allow you to better understand which charges on your bill are legal and which are not. Listed below are some common terms, legal taxes and charges that might appear on you phone bill.

Frequent Flyer Excise Charge: Some of the long distance companies provide you with frequent flyer miles based upon your telephone usage. These frequent flyer miles used to be free. Some long distance providers are now charging a fee for these miles in the form of this charge. Be sure to ask your provider how much extra those "free" flyer miles will cost.

Municipal charge: This fee is charged by your local municipality to defray the costs of community services such as the local Emergency Services (911) operation.

Number portability service charge: A Federal Communications Commission (FCC)-approved charge that pays for the administrative costs incurred by your local phone company in allowing you to switch long distance carriers.

Presubscribed interexchange carrier charge (PICC): Long distance companies pay these charges to local telephone companies for access to their local phone networks. The FCC regulates the price but does not require that long distance companies pass the charges on to customers. As a result, some long distance companies pass this cost directly onto their customers while others include it in the per-minute charges.

Universal Service Charge or USF: This fee is put into the Universal Service Fund, which helps make telephone service available to everyone, including low-income customers, customers in high cost rural areas and to serve customers with disabilities. More recently this fund has been used to wire schools, libraries and hospitals for access to the Internet.

Subscriber line charge (SLC): A charge similar to the PICC, the SLC is billed to you by your local phone company instead of your long distance carrier.