Episode Transcript
[00:00:04] Speaker A: Welcome, everyone, to taxing poetic. I am your host, Tim Howe. Along with my co host, I'm Jenny Carter.
[00:00:11] Speaker B: Nice to have you.
[00:00:11] Speaker A: And as always, we have our esteemed producer here, JB.
[00:00:15] Speaker C: How's it going?
[00:00:15] Speaker A: Awesome. And we are bringing this to you, sponsored by Synexus Tax Solutions. Today we are going to be speaking with a telecommunications expert. Use that term lightly, but no, it's Eric Tresh. He is a partner with Evershed Sutherland. And we're going to be getting to him in just a second. But I'd like to kick this over to Jenny for her haiku. Everybody's sitting waiting for it, so go ahead. Jenny, why don't you do this?
[00:00:40] Speaker B: I know. With bated breath. It's how we start every episode.
[00:00:43] Speaker A: Exactly.
[00:00:43] Speaker B: Can't skip over.
[00:00:44] Speaker A: I know.
[00:00:45] Speaker B: All right, everybody ready?
Jenny is my name. 867-5309 is not my number.
[00:00:56] Speaker A: Okay, that's probably going to be one of my favorite.
[00:00:58] Speaker C: I'm not going to lie.
[00:00:59] Speaker B: Telecom related. And what I wanted to say too, was, Tim, you and I most likely remember this, JB. I don't know about you, when you could dial a number with just seven digits.
[00:01:08] Speaker A: Exactly.
[00:01:09] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:01:09] Speaker C: No area code a thing anymore. You can't even do it if you want to.
[00:01:12] Speaker B: No, not even locally. So, yeah, that brought me back to a simpler time. I love it in telecom history.
[00:01:19] Speaker C: I just watched the BlackBerry, that documentary thing. And the famous line from at T CEO in that is that the problem with selling minutes is there's only a minute in a like. Because now it's all about data and no more local calls and who cares where you are and all these different things. So. Made me think of that.
[00:01:41] Speaker B: I still, 15 years later, make fun of my brother for preferring a BlackBerry to an iPhone because he liked the actual keyboard.
[00:01:48] Speaker C: I mean, that's the whole. I don't know if you've seen the movie, but that's the whole thing.
[00:01:51] Speaker A: Yeah, the keyboard.
[00:01:52] Speaker C: The guy went crazy because he's like, you have to have a keyboard.
[00:01:57] Speaker A: Absolutely.
[00:01:57] Speaker B: So, back to you and Eric.
[00:01:59] Speaker A: Hey, awesome. Thank you so much. Hey, Eric. Tresh, you with us?
[00:02:03] Speaker D: I'll give you two quick things. Jenny, love the intro. First piece of this is so first case I ever tried wasn't really. It was an administrative hearing. Went down to Tennessee, represented a company called American Telnet. American Telnet sold a bunch of 1900 numbers, if you people remember what that is.
[00:02:21] Speaker B: Yes.
[00:02:21] Speaker D: And among the 1900 numbers they sold was Jenny's number. No way.
[00:02:28] Speaker B: They did. No wonder I got so many calls then. No wonder.
[00:02:34] Speaker D: That is a fact Tennessee wanted to tax Jenny's number as an entertainment service. We thought it was over there.
[00:02:41] Speaker B: Not cool.
[00:02:41] Speaker A: Tennessee, that is absolutely awesome.
[00:02:44] Speaker B: That is.
[00:02:47] Speaker A: You know, Eric, honestly, thank you for joining us. I'm going to give a quick background. Eric, Tresh and I have known each other for many, many years. I won't age the two of us, but goes back to, honestly, the beginnings of my career when I was at KPMG and doing some work for a large telecom, and our path crossed and then we just continued to keep in touch and worked on multiple projects with each other. And I've listened to him speak on multiple occasions on broadband and telecommunications issues, and he is absolutely an industry expert. So I'm definitely really glad to have you here with us today, Eric. So just kind of wanted to maybe touch base a little bit with you and maybe kind of explain to our audience, like, we're going to be gearing this entire episode to folks that may not be fitting into the traditional telecom space, but may be starting to sell services that may look and feel like telecom. I know you're starting to probably see a lot of that, right, folks that are offering up SaaS based solutions or other type solutions with virtual offices and things of that nature. And how could telecom impact that? But could you break down for us as a baseline, what are the primary areas of telecommunications between broadband and wireline and stuff like that?
[00:04:04] Speaker D: Yeah, you got it first. Thanks for having me, guys. Tim, we've had a good couple of decade run if we really are aging ourselves. So.
[00:04:11] Speaker A: Yes, sir, you got it, brother.
[00:04:15] Speaker D: But in response to your question, so as we think about the telecom world, it used to be, if I go back to back when you and I were little kids doing this 20 years ago, it was really easy. You had regulated telecommunications companies, and if you were one, you knew what it was. Telecom act of 96 changes that. Deregulation comes along the Internet, and then the lines start blurring. All right, last ten years, the lines start blowing. 15 years between software, telecom, information services, data processing services, and the world starts splitting off as traditional telecom companies become software companies, software companies become telecom companies, and data and analytics companies become a little bit of both. The states look at all this. And they say, well, wait a minute, we used to have this really robust tax base, and the tax base used to be made of everybody in the world who made actual telephone calls. And we would go ahead and impose abusive, really sin taxes. We go ahead and impose them on these monopolistic telecommunications companies, and it would be a great source of revenue. To us. Well, now the value of a voice call is pretty nil, right? You can use FaceTime, Google, whatever app you want to do. You can use an app to make a phone call. And you really don't need a traditional telecom provider. What you need is an Internet service provider to make all those Internet based voice calls if you want to, and use conference calling services and access your software. So as a result of that decreasing tax base, the states go ahead and they react. State and local governments brought in their tax bases to go ahead and apply to SaaS data processing information services and look to shore up that ever declining tax base that used to be based off of voice telecom service. And that's the environment we find ourselves in today, where you have older statutes and older regulations that are being applied to pretty much anything under the sun that involves data moving over a line of some sort.
[00:06:32] Speaker A: So when you and I first really started working together and analyzing, a lot of this was like voiceover IP, right? And that's kind of like what you're talking about with Internet service providers and things of that nature. Are you seeing the same traditional type taxes and franchise fees being applied to VoIP type transactions and ISP type providers?
[00:06:56] Speaker D: Yeah. So let's use my favorite city, San Francisco. Those guys. We've got a warm relationship with those guys out there.
[00:07:03] Speaker A: Hey, man, add them to the hate list.
[00:07:06] Speaker B: Yes, we love making fun. Yes, we love making fun of states and cities.
You fit right in.
[00:07:12] Speaker D: Yes, there you go. So we love those guys, right? So they've got something called the utility users tax. Most cities in California do.
That tax was originally imposed on regulated telecom in 2000 in response to some stuff, it might have been 2000, I forget, but in response to some stuff that Tim and I did, where we got big refunds because their tax bases were pretty narrow, Tim and I got a bunch of big refunds on things like VoIP. All the cities in California, San Francisco included, they brought in their ordinances and they say, this is utility users tax. We're going to impose it on anything that involves data transmission. So lo and behold, what do you have in the past, let's call it 18 months, you've got a city with an 8% tax rate that goes ahead and says, well, pretty much anybody that's transmitting anything, including access to software as a service type programs, those guys owe us this utility users tax that we originally acted enacted to go ahead and apply to traditional telecom. So now I've got an 8% tax that a bunch of cities out in California are saying, hey, maybe that applies a whole lot broader than somebody making telephone calls or using any kind of traditional telecommunications. That's like the prototypical example.
[00:08:35] Speaker A: And is that a pass through? So you're obviously passing that on to the user. Correct.
[00:08:40] Speaker D: Ultimately, the crazy part of it is exactly right. These are taxes that the UT is imposed on the business customer. Yeah, on the customer. And the business collects it. And so what you get is really a highly regressive tax that's imposed on end users of a service there.
[00:09:02] Speaker A: You like. How does this fit in? And this is going to, obviously going to start talking about some taxes that people probably haven't ever looked at or reviewed with regard, unless they've stared at their telephone bill or their cell phone bill. But like FUsF, right. We talked about the federal Universal Service fund and even state universal service funds. Are those decreasing? What's going to happen with those taxes in the future? I mean, obviously we're still seeing those on cell phones. Is it going to be broadening those towards application to these type services?
[00:09:34] Speaker D: One would think so. Right. The FCC currently has a proposal to broaden the Universal service fund out to Internet into broadband Internet access providers because the rate on the USF. Right. It's upwards of 20% today. That's done in response because we've got a declining tax base. Right. You've got not a lot of money going into voice. So there's some proposals to shore up the USF by having it applicable to broadband. That one's fraught with a lot of politics. The idea of imposing some sort of massive new tax on broadband services at the federal level is political hot button. But it's out there being talked about and we'll see. But in its current form, one would think that the USF can only go up. Voice prices are going down.
And this is fun. You've probably seen, right, you've got three federal circuit court challenges out there to the authority of the FCC and USAC to impose the USF in the first.
[00:10:40] Speaker A: And can you talk for a second for folks, because Jenny's kind of looking at me. You're there and she's kind of looking at me with kind of like a blank face, like, what is the universal service fund? So what does it actually fund? What do these taxes actually provide for constituents?
[00:10:56] Speaker D: Yeah, the federal government would tell you it's a fee, first of all. Okay.
We think of it as a tax, to your point. But so what is the federal universal Service fund? Well, it was a fee that was put in place in 1996. And the whole idea behind it was it was to provide universal telephone access to the country. Had a lot of rural areas. They didn't have telephone lines. It's not really economical to build those facilities out in those areas. And so we're going to go ahead and have this national fund where rural providers mostly can seek reimbursement from the federal government through making telephone service available to everybody. It's a laudable goal, but what's happened with it is now you have a situation where I have these massive fees, 20% of a bill that goes into this fund and is being used for all sorts of federal programs.
Depending upon who's in office and their politics. Some of those programs are good, one would argue. Some maybe not so good. Right. But the bottom line is the telephone consumer gets saddled with an extra 20% on their bill. And, yeah, some people don't like that.
[00:12:13] Speaker A: I would venture to guess that a lot of people actually don't like that.
[00:12:16] Speaker C: Eric, I had a question for you.
Who do you usually represent? Are you helping the companies that collect the tax, or are you helping the customer that fights the taxes or both?
[00:12:25] Speaker D: Yeah, no, my business is I represent corporations that are tasked with collecting these taxes or paying them. Right, because you do have a host of these that are imposed on the company itself. And so I only represent corporations. I said a long time ago, individuals are great, but not for know.
[00:12:51] Speaker A: And it's actually really interesting that you asked that JB and this kind of leads into something that is along the city of San Francisco lines. But Eric and I have been working on a case, and we won't obviously discuss the client specifics, but it's a very interesting interpretation of a city and how they've imposed a business license tax on a particular company. And because the city just decided to get rid of this particular classification, they decided to change this entire business's classification for the tax base and just say, hey, sorry, we got rid of that classification. Now we think you fit within a professional service. And we're like, well, no, we're not a professional service. We're actually a software company. It clearly says they're like, well, we don't really have a software company definition. So you're professional service. Congratulations. So what will happen is that I then blow the flag and say, hey, Eric, come help me out. Come help me do some interpretations. And he sits down with me and we figure out and approach a position. But, yeah, that's historically how we've always worked together.
[00:13:53] Speaker D: And it morphs. Right, Tim? So the other fun one, Massachusetts, is my other fun example.
[00:14:00] Speaker A: We refer to them as taxachusetts, by the way.
[00:14:03] Speaker D: But yes, he's using.
They rock over there. So they go ahead and they decide that they're going to impose their sales tax on conference calling, bridging services. Right. So we might think of a bridge as software.
They thought of it as software, too. But software, that's taxable as telecommunications under their ordinance. So they go ahead and they impose this tax on Citrix.
Citrix actually wins the case and the court holds that Citrix is actually software. Great news. We're rocking. Citrix gets its classification. So what does Massachusetts do? So Massachusetts then tries a case for a company called Akami, which is a software provider, and goes ahead and says, you know what? We're going to go ahead. And since everybody's software in Massachusetts, we're going to go ahead and treat you as a manufacturer and you're going to be subject to apportionment using a single sales factor instead of a three factor.
So they flipped it. Right. So even when you win, you lose out in Massachusetts, it's the moral to the story.
[00:15:19] Speaker A: They're always going to find a way, man.
[00:15:22] Speaker D: That's the program.
[00:15:25] Speaker A: That's exactly it. That's 100% why we exist. So to geek out a little bit more on a couple of things, can you talk about e 911 for a minute?
You and I worked with a client in the past with regards to prepaid phones, right? And a lot of people would call it like the Obamacare phones and stuff like that.
What are the differences of how an surcharge, I mean, obviously e 911 surcharges for our audience. They're charges that are actually, and fees that are put on your bill to support 911 services so that you can get police and fire and everything else.
[00:16:07] Speaker B: Which is pretty important.
[00:16:08] Speaker C: Seems fine.
[00:16:09] Speaker B: Yeah, I'm cool with that.
[00:16:11] Speaker A: Absolutely 110%. But it's really kind of interesting how the law can be construed as to which types of companies are actually subject to collecting these types of fees. Right, Eric?
[00:16:21] Speaker B: Well, Eric, real quick. Sorry. My thought was, and correct me if I'm wrong with e 911 fees, is that it was similar to a USF fee where you're also collecting for rural areas to compensate for 911 emergencies or.
[00:16:37] Speaker D: No perfect lead in. So again, we start with a laudable purpose, making sure when I hit 911 and I need an ambulance to come, that they show up or I need the police to come. Great purpose, right. We could all agree that's a good thing. So what do the states do? They turn. What was a fee for a specific purpose. And this fee versus tax distinction, Tim, we've dealt with this a lot, really meaningful in what we do. So they take this 911 fee in a lot of places and they say, you know, this is a great source of revenue. Why don't we use it for other purposes? And so a bunch of states and local governments start depositing the 911 fee into their general funds for use for general purposes, thereby turning a fee into a tax. And that's become, again, point to our friends out in California. At the local level, most of their, quote, 911 fees are really just taxes that they deposit into general revenue that they use for any number of purposes which may or may not include 911. So that's the problem. Then the second piece of that, now that I've turned this once laudable fee on legacy telecommunications providers into a tax, I start broadening the base and I start looking at, well, if I've got this tax and it's imposed on, quote, telecom, who gets roped into that in a lot of places? You'd be surprised at the breadth of businesses that could be roped into that sort of tax just by the mere fact that they're transmitting voice, video or data over a phone.
[00:18:12] Speaker A: Awesome.
[00:18:13] Speaker B: Oh, I just had a quick question regarding current events. Eric, what are your thoughts on the $5 credit I'm receiving for my phone not working last week for several hours?
[00:18:25] Speaker A: Yeah. And how are they going to credit that tax back, by the way? How are they going to figure out that tax?
[00:18:29] Speaker C: I know that they're only paying out it's $0.41 over twelve months because they're not giving.
That'd be a billion dollars. They'd have to pay like tomorrow. They have 400 million customers.
[00:18:41] Speaker D: Hey, look, if they were consulting with you guys, I am sure what you would tell them is that that credit has to reduce the taxes on my bill and therefore my $0.41 is actually 41.5 cents I'm saving. That's exactly right on my credit because.
[00:18:58] Speaker A: It'S got to go back to the user.
[00:19:01] Speaker B: Yeah, exactly.
[00:19:02] Speaker D: Well, we've been having great talks with all these companies around promotional discounts and how, whether they're discounts or rebates and how it goes ahead and impacts the ultimate tax bill. So that's always a fun discussion.
[00:19:14] Speaker B: Well, a little bit more of a sidebar. We can tee this up also for our related true crime episode. Unfortunately, we heard about the UGA student who was murdered recently on campus, or not a student, but was a recent graduate. And the exact time that the phone services went down was the time that she was unfortunately murdered.
[00:19:41] Speaker C: Crazy.
[00:19:41] Speaker B: And possibly because I saw that in the charges, they don't think she was able to down 911, even though they said the SOS services were available.
[00:19:52] Speaker A: I'll tell you about this for a second, because this is the most interesting thing. So Eric and I, when we were both working at a large telecommunications broadband company together up in North Carolina, we were working on a project to streamline their entire sales tax function. And it was sales tax as well as Fusf and all these other things to kind of figure out a way to automate it, because they had a very old and antiquated system. And so when we were trying to figure out the sourcing of these transactions, when you actually look at 911 and how it works, and you wonder why some of these funds exist. To basically support the development of the software that manages this for you to be able, wherever you're at right now, on your phone, to be able to triangulate and figure out where to go. You could be bouncing off a cell phone tower that's a mile and a half from here, but it needs to know your specific location. So it's passing things like latin launch and all this other stuff, latitude and longitude, all the coordinates and things. Well, that folds into what they call a point in polygon system. That is a map that overlays geopolitical boundaries. So that, number one, you got to figure out, okay, where's this person at? And where do I actually send a police car from? What dispatch and what station? It is the most complex and incredible system, right? But when we started trying to infiltrate it to figure out, like, hey, how can we get tax information out of this? You're wondering. You're like, wow, this looks really cool. And this is really amazing how you guys do this, but it's built on the backbone of, like, 1980s type technology. And you're wondering why they haven't upgraded and spend money to upgrade this, right?
[00:21:26] Speaker C: I think to Eric's point, because you can just get so much money, and they're like, prove it. Tell me that we're doing it differently.
[00:21:33] Speaker A: Tell me if I'm wrong, Eric. Right.
[00:21:35] Speaker D: That's basically, you guys got this. The sidebar on this is companies are figuring out how to use this data for all sorts of compliance. So think about trucks that roll through a highway for motor fuel taxes, right? They know exactly where their trucks are using that system.
Think about any business claiming various credits on mobile property as it's in transit. Those guys can go ahead and use that data to enhance their compliance. There's a lot of positive stuff that can be used with that data if it's put to a good use.
[00:22:14] Speaker A: Right.
[00:22:14] Speaker D: So that's the linchpin.
[00:22:16] Speaker A: Right, exactly. And if we can obviously have the advanced systems to be able to pull that information out, which thank God for obviously in the last ten to 15 years, our system environment and application environment has been enhanced so much that we have access to that kind of data. But it's amazing to me how long it's taken. And there are still a number of these rural municipalities and other locations that don't have those types of advanced systems.
[00:22:40] Speaker B: Well, JB, it sounds like you agree with me. I'm happy to pay the tax to support that. When I call 911, I would like them to know where I am.
[00:22:46] Speaker C: They got to show up.
[00:22:47] Speaker A: Yeah.
This is a great final segue into one of our last things that I wanted to cover with Eric. And Eric, I don't know if these guys were a client and I don't. If you can opine on this so you can tell us, hey, dude, I can't offer you a comment on it, whatever. But we were going to talk really quickly about the sprint whistleblower case from a number of years ago.
Obviously you're familiar with that, right? Where the guy that was asking questions about his cell phone bill and basically resulting in a massive refund. Right. For sales taxes.
[00:23:17] Speaker D: Well, I'm going to segue away from any discussion around sprint and those guys, I've worked with them for years.
[00:23:24] Speaker A: But here's nice segue, brother.
[00:23:30] Speaker D: So this whole concept of false claims act, whistleblower cases, this I do have, I've got a strong view on this, particularly the New York state side of this, these statutes, right, where you can have an individual that's looking at someone's sales tax bills or telecommunications tax bills and trying to create errors, often where none exist, they wind up being to the detriment of everybody out there. But as it relates to corporations, here's the pickle you're in. If you go ahead and under comply, right. Because there's 500 shades of gray out there. As you guys know, you're going to go ahead and you're going to get assessed by the state agency. If you go ahead and over comply, you are going to have a private enforcement action brought against you by a whistleblower. So unfortunately, right, as a company, that leaves you in the point of view of having to do perfection because you're going to get sued one way or another. And that's a really precarious position to be in given the complexity of the tax and fee environment out there. There needs to be some understanding of reasonable basis out there. And unfortunately, especially as it relates to whistleblowers, there's not.
And that's a shame. So we do our best to a help our clients make sure that governments don't pass laws that place private enforcement in the hands of a bunch of class action lawyers. And obviously, we all do our best to make sure that our clients are complying with whatever state and local tax laws they need to.
[00:25:12] Speaker A: And it's so interesting, man, because you can kind of point that directly to obviously what historically has been happening in the medical industry with malpractice lawsuits and people asking for tort reform and things of that nature. Right?
[00:25:23] Speaker D: Increased costs for everybody.
[00:25:25] Speaker A: That's exactly it, man of the McDonald's.
[00:25:29] Speaker C: Hot coffee, where they were like, okay, the coffee is 111 degrees, but the hotter you make coffee, the longer it stays. And so they're like, people are going to get sued because the coffee, they're going to burn themselves with the coffee. But we will pay less, not making new coffee than we will for the paying out the lawsuits.
[00:25:48] Speaker D: I'll give you a shameless plug, and admittedly, it's a shameless plug on that one. The biggest mistake that corporations have when they go ahead and they get a false claims actsuit is invariably there's a subset of them that will hire a non tax lawyer to try and defend what is inherently a tax case. And they will treat this like any old litigation and they will get all. I teach over at Emory law, Tim. You know that.
[00:26:15] Speaker A: Yes, I do.
[00:26:15] Speaker D: One of the things I tell my students at Emory law on the first day is you don't hire a general litigator, really, to do anything. If I had an SEC lawsuit, I'd find an SEC lawyer. If I have a medical malpractice issue, I'm going to find somebody that knows something about that. General litigation is not really a thing in my view.
[00:26:38] Speaker A: Eric's point of finding an experienced litigator, finding an experienced tax lawyer. Some of these laws and some of these situations in these jurisdictions get really complex, and you do not want to go at this with a generalist. Just like in the CPA world, we know sales and use tax specialists like Jenny and myself. We have property tax specialists, we have individuals that work just on aircraft transactions. The same thing happens in the legal realm, right? You have true tax lawyers that live and breathe this stuff, which is the reason that Eric's part of us today. And Eric, my last question to, you know, we've seen Wayfair. You and I had some great discussions on Wayfair before the opinion came down.
But my question to you, now that we're six years almost removed from Wayfair on the telecom front, are you guys seeing any simplification? Are you seeing anything that's going to drive a more simplified approach to telecom? Because it's part of the reason we have you as a guest. This is an area of taxation that we don't delve into too much right now. I mean, we're getting into telecom compliance. Jenny's historically done telecom compliance. I have a few professionals on my team that have done it. But is there any form of simplification that you see coming down or is it just like, hey, it's going to remain wild, wild west for the time?
[00:27:56] Speaker D: No, not at all. The MTC and streamlined sales tax, they've got some reasonable efforts out there to try and simplify things. I think there's a lot of well meaning people working on that. But the truth of the matter is there's too much revenue loss at the local levels and the locals aren't going to give up control. And if the locals aren't going to give up control, the idea that there's meaningful simplification at the state level, it probably doesn't happen. So I'm skeptical.
[00:28:26] Speaker A: And in all honesty, we've talked about this on a couple of other episodes as well, that the simplification of sales tax in the United States, in my mean, much like you said, I know there's know people who are trying to do the right thing with MTC and with streamline and stuff. Like, I mean, when you've got the states pulling the strings and especially when the big players like California and Texas and Louisiana and New York aren't going to get on board. Forget it, man. It's never going to happen, right?
[00:28:50] Speaker D: That's right. That's exactly right.
I don't see it, but hope springs eternal. Maybe one day when you and I are gone ten, I'll figure it out.
[00:29:00] Speaker A: No kidding. I hope it's long after I'm gone. So anyways, it'll keep us employed for the time being. So. Hey, Eric, in all honesty, man, I really appreciate you taking the time out of your schedule today. It's always awesome to talk to you and Jenny or JB. You got anything else that you want to talk to Eric about?
[00:29:17] Speaker B: I don't think so. Oh, do we have apologies, JB?
[00:29:19] Speaker C: Yeah. The only people we have to apologize to is San Francisco. Okay.
I'll tell you, I don't really know why we're apologizing to them. It felt like we needed to, though.
[00:29:29] Speaker A: It was like a backhanded kind of slap.
[00:29:30] Speaker C: I can tell.
[00:29:32] Speaker D: I like those guys. They're always.
[00:29:34] Speaker C: Usually we apologize to a big general group of people hoping we catch the people that we offended.
[00:29:39] Speaker B: And, JB, it sounds like you were able to sense the sarcasm, which is.
[00:29:43] Speaker C: Why I wrote it down.
[00:29:45] Speaker B: We were laying it on pretty thick.
[00:29:46] Speaker C: And then, of course, Massachusetts Taxachusetts. And then Tim said, we love to call them.
I'm not a part of this.
[00:29:54] Speaker B: Correct.
[00:29:55] Speaker D: Nice, well meaning folks.
[00:29:57] Speaker A: Exactly. I have no income being a portion there, so I'm safe.
[00:30:00] Speaker B: Well, Eric, we would love to have you on another time. And we can make fun of more states and cities. That's what we like to do around here.
[00:30:06] Speaker A: Absolutely. Yeah. Next time. Next time you're in town, man, let's figure out a time to get together and grab some lunch.
[00:30:10] Speaker B: Thank you for being with us today, Eric. It was so nice to meet you.
[00:30:13] Speaker D: Nice to meet you. Thank you guys for having me. I enjoyed it. Always good to talk to you guys.
[00:30:17] Speaker B: And thank you so much, Eric, Tresh, for being on the show today. And a reminder for our audience, we have a whole library of episodes for you to peruse regarding states and topics with other guest hosts. And so we invite you to listen to all those, and you don't have to listen to them in order. And you can listen to us on, let's see, Apple, Google, YouTube, video and music. Is that correct, JB? Okay. And Stitcher, thanks so much for being with us today. We'll see you next time on taxing poetic.
[00:30:43] Speaker A: Take care, y'all.
