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Re: wcom overbilling

  • From: Robert Boyle
  • Date: Sat Jul 06 15:57:39 2002

At 09:41 AM 7/6/2002 -1000, you wrote:
: It clearly is a revenue source. Once a customer gets a disconnect letter
: for their service due to an unpaid balance (which they shouldn't be able to
: do if the current non-disputed part is paid in full) then the heads roll
: and the padded bill gets paid even though it is wrong. AT&T is infamous for

That doesn't seem to help revenue.  If that was the case, they'd make
money by getting rid of customers all the time.  The goal should be to
overbill and yet keep the customer.  Somehow...
Ok. Maybe I wasn't clear. What I meant was that bills rarely get fixed in the corporate world because the fear of an interruption of service is greater than the desire to fix the bill. I see it all the time with out large institutional clients. The peons in the accounting department don't want to be the responsible for the long distance being shut off because they only paid $0.03 per minute instead of the $.20 per minute which AT&T billed - so... the inflated bills get paid even though they shouldn't. We have caught a few billing mistakes over the years in our clients favor and pro-actively issued credits and they are always blown away when we call to tall them they don't need to pay for x amount of time because they paid an invoice twice or we found that they were being double billed due to a circuit move, etc. They would gladly pay the bill anyway. Once vendor X is approved, the bills are rarely matched against contracts and a list of live services or circuits. Even my company has issues with this and we have a small accounting department and we run a tight ship. I guess what I'm saying is that for all the inflated revenue on their books, they also get some real revenue as a result although it is via what I see as fraud.

-Robert


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