By Roy Pelovello

CONGRESSMEN want to slap a 10-centavo fee on each text message sent, a cost that will likely be shouldered by consumers.

Quezon Rep. Danilo Suarez, chairman of the House oversight committee, said funds raised by the measure would be used for education and other socioeconomic measures to ease the effects of the global economic crisis.

Suarez said he could not guarantee the fee would not be passed on to consumers, and could only appeal to the cell phone service providers to absorb the cost since ?they have been raking in billions in profits.?

With about two billion text messages sent daily, Suarez said, the government stood to gain P200 million in revenue every day.

Asked if the same fee would be applied to free or unlimited text messages, Suarez said this would be left to the National Telecommunications Commission to work out.

Suarez said the fee on text messages was only a beginning. Congress would also seek to raise revenue by taxing cell phone calls and Internet traffic.

But Camarines Norte Rep. Liwayway Vinzons-Chato said the House should be careful to say that the new fee to be imposed was not a tax to defuse opposition to the measure.

Previous attempts to tax text messages have failed because of strong public opposition to raising the cost on the cheapest form of communication favored by the poor.

Suarez did not specify which educational programs the money raised would help finance, but focused instead on the availability of technology to monitor the amount of text traffic of any given telecommunications carrier.

Among those invited to the hearing were representatives of Verint, a New York-based company providing such services.

On its Web site, Verint said its services included the collection, retention, administration, retrieval, and delivery of historical data records for regulatory compliance.