We have heard from lots of our resellers the same story that other upstream carriers or white label providers telling their resellers they don’t need to collect and charge taxes and fees and can just passthrough what the upstream carrier charges them.
Jonathan Marashlian is one of the most prominent lawyers in the Telecom space and he wrote an advisory about this today. He laid out the facts and that even small resellers must tax their customers at the retail rate and they themselves must file and submit all taxes. You the reseller can not rely on your upstream carriers or white label platform to do it for you if you the reseller are charging the customers for voice services on an invoice that has your company name on it.
Here is a great article about the mandatory Robocall Mitigation Database filling that all resellers of voice services must complete by May 28th. If not completed all carriers and resellers must not allow any outbound calls from a reseller who does not have a filling.
The big gotcha here is the FCC is starting their audit of all the RMD fillings. One of the requirements is to attest to having STIR/SHAKEN, which is required of all VOIP provides and resellers. They are now verifying you have an actual token issued and if not you have now committed perjury by claiming you are STIR/SHAKEN compliant since all VOIP providers have no exemptions from STIR/SHAKEN anymore. Only providers still using TDM tandems like SS7 have exemptions for that traffic.
Like with taxes you can not rely on your upstream provider to sign outbound calls from your customers with their own STIR/SHAKEN certificate. You must use your own certificate.
One of the many requirements of getting a STIR/SHAKEN Token issued is to have a 499 filer ID, which requires you to file quarterly or yearly fillings of all your company revenues and break out all voice services for taxation of the 4 different federal fees for telecom services.
The days of small resellers selling voice services and flying under the radar are quickly coming to an end here.