The federal government's inability to to reauthorize the operation of the FAA may give travellers a tax refund on their ticket purchases.
August 5, 2011- Chances are if you are traveling this month the government owes you a tax refund. Congress’ inability to reauthorize the operation of the Federal Aviation Administration caused the law for federal taxes on airline tickets to expire.
Periodically Congress must renew the FAA’s authorization to do the multitude of things they do including collecting federal taxes for air travel. The problems Congress recently was facing with the deficit caused the importance of FAA renewal to reduce in size to almost nothing.
On July 23rd the authorization for the FAA to collect taxes expired. The hope was the FAA would receive attention as soon as the deficit crisis had ended but that was not the case until Friday when Congress voted on refunding the FAA. But until that time four taxes were not authorized to be collected.
Those taxes include 7.5% on the base ticket price, a $3.70 domestic segment tax per ticket, a facilities tax for international travel of $16.30 per ticket and a 6.25% tax for property transported by air. Refunds for these taxes are for tickets that were purchased prior to the expiration of the tax collecting on July 23 and travel was for between that date and Friday August 5th.
