The Administrative Cost Of ATC User Fees

On Jul 8, 3:46 pm, kontiki wrote:

Take a look at the IRS... collecting processing taxes
(which are essentially "user fees") .. its a MASSIVE bureaucracy
which cost taxpayes an insane amount of overhead.

That's just not a fact. The IRS "bureaucracy" costs roughly $10
billion divided by $2 trillion collected. That only .5% in collection
costs, the most efficient in the world. The FAA originally proposed
an unspecified user fee for just landing/departing Class B. That
could be collected by the Airport Authorities at 30 big airports and
turned over periodically to FAA.

The stupid Senate made it a $25 IFR fee for all turbine aircraft, w/o
saying how FAA would collect. However, law could say that IRS collects
this, like on a quarterly form the way the airline ticket tax is
voluntarily paid to IRS. Voluntarily compliance would be extremely
high, since FAA could provide an IFR data file to IRS for computer
match. Anybody not fessing up gets a notice. Don't pay within X
days, no turbine IFR flight plan for that operator gets accepted by
FAA's system! Hardly any other IRS tax has such a cheap and effective
enforcement mechanism.

FAA could manage this also at low cost. Probably more than .5% of
collections, since IRS has the procedures/experience in place, but not
much more. I don't agree with IFR user fees, but I don't agree either
with hyperbole as to actual cost.

F--