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termination bills) and by overcharging a significant number of customers terminating their ‘Pay Monthly’ services with O2, between at least and 15 March 2019. O2 did so by failing to render or make available accurate final bills to be issued to customers after their cancellation of services (i.e. …Ofcom found that Telefónica UK Limited (trading as ‘O2’) had contravened its regulatory obligations in relation to accurate billing. Ofcom sets the scene at the beginning of their second report. Per Ofcom’s own words: “Case opened 13 December 2019 Case closed 01 December 2021”.
#COMPLETE ANATOMY BILLING FULL#
If nothing else, the time taken to complete Ofcom’s investigation of whether they were misinformed gives us a meaningful indication of how hard it can be to determine the full truth about billing failures. However, a great deal of work has ultimately gone into understanding what went wrong in O2, and there is no advantage to consumers if every other telco is forced to learn from their own mistakes just to spare the trivial additional effort involved in circulating information about what happened in O2. Ofcom’s lack of competence in this domain is evidenced by the slow rate of progress for their investigation after customers have already endured so many years of failure.
#COMPLETE ANATOMY BILLING HOW TO#
Ofcom can reasonably argue it is not their responsibility to teach telcos how to bill customers. Last week’s report, which provides much more detail, and which explains the basis of an additional fine of GBP150,000 (USD200,000) because O2 failed to provide accurate answers to Ofcom’s questions during their investigation of the billing errors.īefore delving into this second report, it is worth stepping back and contemplating how unfortunate it is that Ofcom chose to spread relevant information about the same underlying mistakes across two unhelpfully-titled reports published almost a year apart.The investigation report published by Ofcom in early 2021 which was used to justify imposing a GBP10.5mn (USD14.5mn) fine on O2 for failing to bill correctly Commsrisk already covered this report here.
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The two documents describe the conclusions reached by Ofcom after it was found that systematic errors caused mobile operator O2, the UK division of Telefónica, to overcharge at least a quarter of a million customers between 20, and then led them to inadequately explain the faults to Ofcom when the regulator began its own investigation of the scale of mistakes that were made.
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The UK regulator has long maintained a pretense of having a ‘zero tolerance’ stance on overcharging, but neither they nor most of the industry wants to admit how much work would need to be performed to deliver it in practice. However, it is highly unlikely that more than a few people will learn anything from the experience.Īlthough the two reports represent the pinnacle of an unusually large amount of work that went into analyzing and documenting how a phone bill can contain errors, neither the regulator, auditors nor the telco want this to be turned into a teachable moment that will help others to avoid mistakes. In this instance, it took 15 years for the complaints of customers to eventually prompt a fundamental correction in the way flawed systems operated. They also provide a deep insight into how complicated the process of charging customers can be, and hence why superficial tests and auditing will never be sufficient to identify all the kinds of errors that can actually occur. When read together, the two publications present a litany of failures by both the telco responsible and the business paid to audit their metering and billing accuracy. Between the two documents, I doubt we will ever see a more exhaustive dissection of the real-life subject matter of revenue assurance being released into the public domain.
#COMPLETE ANATOMY BILLING SERIES#
Ofcom, the UK comms regulator, recently published the second document in a series that provides the most comprehensive case study of how a telco can allow hundreds of thousands of customers to be incorrectly charged without taking timely corrective action.