John Linton
In a different 'life' I made a handsome living by checking large company's telephone bills at no charge other than a 10% fee of any reductions in the bills subsequently credited to the client by the telephone service provider/carrier. Two events over the past two days reminded me of just how long this, and I don't think there's another word to use, FRAUD, has been going on.
One was this brief article in the Australian:
http://www.australianit.news.com.au/story/0,24897,23762987-15306,00.html
and, more tellingly several of the on line comments made below the article.
The second event was the receipt of yet another large credit (of $A189,000) on bills we paid to a supplier for services that have been in dispute for getting on for two years now. Over the two years that we have been disputing billed charges with that supplier we have managed to 'claw back' $A1,348,044 in incorrect charges on bills totaling a little over $A7 million - an error, in the supplier's favour, of over 18% and more than enough incorrect payments to have sent us broke by now if we hadn't refused to pay the bills at their 'face value'.
The billing problems with EVERY major supplier add a very, very significant over payment every month to almost every corporate and government entity's bills and has required many of them to employ people or retain 'consultants' to check their telco bills to attempt to prevent ongoing massive over paying.
What do the suppliers say about this?
I can only go on my own experience, both for companies I've been directly involved in and those I've provided services to. The invariable answer is always the same:
"If you wish to dispute any part of your bill please use the appropriate process and with hold payment"
Sounds fair enough? You have to be joking. Why should ANY commercial enterprise think it's "OK" to consistently over bill its customers and demand that the customer check huge numbers of line items to determine the basis for establishing what the correct charge should be?
More than one person who commented on that Australian article pointed out that the same error types appear on successive bills showing that the invoicing software contains endemic calculation errors. This means that the telco(s) concerned knowingly issue bills each month that contain millions of dollars of errors which the management of the telcos concerned know is happening and do nothing about.
Knowing this situation has meant that from its very early 'life' Exetel has been writing bill checking software for each of the suppliers we use which checks all aspects of the bills we receive electronically (and, yes, some suppliers still send very hard to check 'paper' bills in quasi electronic form). Our methodology is to write a 'reverse' billing process that checks each line item on the bill against the contracted rate per service component. We have been writing these bill checking programs for almost 4 years and they have saved us, literally, millions of dollars in over charges.
However, the cost to us of writing the software and then the people time involved in disputing the charges with the different suppliers has been very, very expensive - and we shouldn't have had to incur such expenses.
In any other circumstances, based on my brief, incomplete and quite possibly wrong, knowledge of Australian criminal law this seem to me to be deliberate fraud or obtaining money by false pretences.
These aren't "human errors" nor are they "transient and quickly corrected minor coding issues" which are the rote statements always offered as a 'defence'.
Why aren't they?
Because if they were, the 'laws of averages' would suggest that over millions of dollars of bills the errors in the telco's favour would be offset by the errors in the customer's favour - which, very clearly, isn't the case - in Exetel's case with a single supplier the errors are 18% in favour of the telco every month and known "coding errors" are never corrected.
I think that any reasonable, and reasonably intelligent person would struggle to find any other explanation for such a circumstance other than the billing code is written deliberately to over bill.
So why aren't the CEO's of such companies prosecuted and jailed just as all other criminals are? Don't they authorise the writing of the billing systems and their implementation and don't they know that the billing systems consistently over bill and that therefore their company receives money to which it's not entitled?