Get Your One-Time Phone-Tax Refund

Editor's note: As a special feature for March, TheStreet.com offers an ongoing series on everything you need to know about taxes. Today is part nine.

The IRS is giving you a one-time offer of free money. Seriously. All you need to do to qualify is pay your taxes and have owned a phone.

The Telephone Excise Tax Refund is a refund of the 3% federal excise tax you paid for your phone's long-distance service from Feb. 28, 2003, to Aug. 1, 2006. The refund is available to anyone who paid such taxes on landline, wireless or voice-over-Internet-protocol (VoIP) service, and as I mentioned, is good for this year only.

Why is the IRS giving us this refund? Because of the war. The Spanish-American War, that is. Back in 1898, to help fund the fighting in the Caribbean, the U.S. government placed a federal excise tax on phone service. Of course, back then, only the wealthiest Americans owned one of the new-fangled voice-over-copper-wire devices.

But in August, the government stopped collecting this long-distance excise tax after several federal court decisions held that the tax does not apply to long-distance service as it is billed today. But because we all were erroneously charged, a one-time refund of any tax collected during those previous 41 months also was authorized.

Now before we talk about how you can claim this refund, know this: The average refund ranges from $30 to $60, depending on your exemptions. So this refund is not going to cover your next family vacation. Sorry to burst your bubble. Still, that $60 is your money, so get it back (you can always buy another phone with it, if you want).