Phone Bills Need to Be Simplified, Regulators Say

If your phone bill seems to be getting tougher to figure out, you’re not alone.

Even experts confess they have difficulty decoding phone bills that in recent years have added fees, taxes and explanations of the new charges that more often than not add to the confusion.

Telephone regulators--led by Federal Communications Commission Chairman William E. Kennard, who says he has trouble understanding his own bill--are expected this month to issue proposals aimed at making phone bills less confusing. But it’s not clear how to accomplish that. The agency now lets companies decide how to list and explain charges.

“Reading your phone bill should not be like reading ‘Ulysses’--long and complicated,” Kennard said.

Larry Irving, President Clinton’s top telecommunications policy advisor, leaves the job of calculating the home phone bill to the family MBA--his wife, Leslie.

“I’m just a lawyer,” said Irving. “A college degree and a law degree are not enough to decipher it. I need somebody who has had accounting and finance.”

Phone companies insist they are trying to make bills easier to understand. They don’t want regulators dictating bill formats.

One reason phone bills have gotten more complex in recent years is because companies are offering a wider variety of services, including Internet access, second lines and voice mail.

Many of these charges--including long-distance--usually end up in one large bill issued by the local phone company.

Another reason: Phone companies, fearing customer backlash, are breaking out the government-ordered subsidies that once were included in rates and itemizing new federal charges from last year’s government overhaul of phone fees.

Phone bills should be simpler and more informative, Kennard says, because that makes it easier for consumers to shop around and figure out if they’re charged for something they didn’t buy.

In California, GTE Corp. said it is making a series of changes to its phone bills over the next six months--including adding color and graphics--to make them more readable, according to Larry Cox, a GTE spokesman.

The company said focus groups revealed the need for more explanation of the many taxes and surcharges on local phone bills.

In California, those charges include mind-boggling titles like “California High Cost Fund A surcharge,” “California Teleconnect Fund surcharge” or “California Relay Service and Communications Devices surcharge.”

“The tax section has been an area of concern, because our customers have told us that they don’t understand them,” said Cox at GTE. “We’ve tried very hard to clean up the language and make it easier to understand.”

SBC Communications, the San Antonio-based company that owns Pacific Bell, said the company redesigned its bills two years ago and made other changes, including larger print and additional languages.

“Making bills easy to use and understand has always been important to SBC,” the company said in a statement. “We’re always happy to consider new ideas to make bills more user-friendly.”

The administration’s Irving thinks phone companies should agree voluntarily to use “plain language,” and believes federal legislation may be warranted if they don’t.

But Roy Neel of the United States Telephone Assn. says all customers really need to do to understand bills is give them a careful review.