(PRWEB) October 12, 2011
On October 11, 2011, Plaintiffs Clint Rasschaert, Ed Risch, Pam Schiller and Verna Schuna filed a lawsuit in the Federal District Court for the District of Minnesota, alleging that Frontier Communications of America, Inc. (“Frontier”) imposed illegal taxes and fees on them and thousands of other customers in violation of the Internet Tax Freedom Act. Under the Act, the sale of internet service is not subject to state and local taxes.
The lawsuit also alleges that Frontier imposed a fraudulent “HSI Surcharge.” According to the lawsuit, Frontier represented to its customers that this surcharge was governmentally imposed, when in fact, the surcharge was actually just a junk fee that Frontier invented and imposed on its customers in order to inflate the price of its service. According to the lawsuit, the prices Frontier advertised to its customers did not include this surcharge, even though Frontier always intended to charge it.
Plaintiff's attorney, E. Michelle Drake, commented, “Customers should not have to check the sales tax calculations on their bills to make sure they are right, and they shouldn’t have to be legal experts to figure out whether charges that are represented as being government charges are actually government charges. We shouldn’t need to sue just to get big corporations to truthfully bill their customers,” she continued.
Frontier Communications of America is a Delaware corporation that provides long distance service to customers throughout the United States. According to Frontier’s website, the company has over 7.4 million total access lines. As a result, damages could run well into the hundreds of millions of dollars.
Plaintiffs are represented by E. Michelle Drake from Nichols Kaster, PLLP, which has offices in Minneapolis, Minnesota and San Francisco, California. The case is entitled Rasschaert, et al. v. Frontier Communications Corporation of America, et al., No. 11-cv-2963 (October 11, 2011 D. Minn) Additional information about the case can be found at http://www.nka.com/case/frontier-communications/.