AT&T Petitions Mississippi Supreme Court for Broadband Tax Exemption

AT&T is asking the Mississippi Supreme Court, through an interlocutory appeal, to reverse a lower state court decision affirming Jasper County’s denial of AT&T’s request for a statutory tax exemption on all its qualified broadband equipment, said AT&T’s petition Friday (docket 2023-3955). Since the broadband exemption was first enacted in 2002, counties throughout Mississippi, including Jasper, have granted AT&T the exemption, it said. But for the 2022 tax year, Jasper for the first time denied AT&T the broadband exemption “for every single item of equipment AT&T listed as exempt," though it was substantially the same equipment that Jasper “previously had acknowledged as exempt,” it said. The only reason that Jasper gave for its “unprecedented denial” was that the equipment didn’t meet the exemption’s supposed intent, it said. Jasper has never disputed, and can’t dispute, that the equipment AT&T listed as exempt in its “renditions” for tax year 2022 “in fact meets the statutory criteria” for the broadband exemption, it said. AT&T's petition “presents a pure question of law” -- whether the broadband exemption applies when there’s no dispute that the equipment at issue “meets the plain language” of the exemption, it said. “Resolving the question now would materially advance the termination of the litigation, avoid the expense of trial, and promote uniformity of judgments across the multiple counties in which identical suits are pending,” said the petition. Granting the petition also would allow the court to clarify to all counties that the broadband exemption “must be applied as written,” it said. In so doing, the court would also “resolve the same issue in many other actions that AT&T and other providers are pursuing across the state,” it said.