Phone Bills Push Customers’ Buttons
Wilma Ker knows how to read English just fine. But it took her 12 years to fully decipher her telephone bill.
The Granada Hills resident continued to pay GTE a monthly fee for renting a rotary telephone, even though she says she stopped using the relic at least a decade ago. She mostly blames the phone company’s bill, which referred to the $3.40 monthly charge only as “equipment rental.”
“I suppose I should have been more aware,” Ker said. “However, had they been a little more specific about what that charge was, if they had said ‘equipment rental of a rotary phone,’ I would have known.”
Consumer advocates say Ker’s case points up an unfortunate byproduct of telephone deregulation: With a large variety of telephone options and services, a phone bill can resemble a tax accountant’s ledger.
To make bills easier to understand and to help stamp out increasing fraud, the Federal Communications Commission has adopted new guidelines that would bring about so-called truth in billing. The measure requires local phone companies to explain charges in plain language.
“The most common complaint we get is ‘We can’t understand our telephone bill,’ ” said Charles Carbone, a consumer advocate with the Utility Consumers Action Network, a San Diego-based watchdog group. “The telephone bill has always been over-complex. . . . And in a deregulated environment--a ‘confus-opoly’--there’s even more need for consumer protections and clear and conspicuous disclosure of the products being offered.”
Now, Ker, 71, is trying to recoup more than $400 in phone rental fees, and to tell others not to take their phone bills at face value.
GTE acknowledges charging the fees and says it’s up to customers to notify the company that they are no longer renting specific equipment.
Ker said she would have notified the company had she understood the bill.
“If you look at the bill, there’s city tax and this and that and so on, and all these things,” said Ker, who has lived in her north Valley home since 1956. “I look [closely] at my charges for long distance. All this other stuff I just take it for granted that they’re being honest with what they’re charging me and I never questioned it.”
Such attitudes, coupled with increasingly complex bills, are making more and more consumers victims of billing mistakes and out-and-out fraud, consumer advocates say.
Julia Wilson, a spokeswoman for GTE, said Monday that the company sent out notices in 1986 (Ker said she was told it was 1987) alerting customers that they had the option of purchasing their own phone, rather than continuing to rent.
In addition, for some years after that, the company sent out billing inserts that detailed phone charges, Wilson said. That practice has been discontinued, but she was not certain when or why.
Wilson also said the matter could have been cleared up years ago, had Ker inquired earlier.
“Say she looked at the bill 12 years ago and said, ‘I wonder what that charge is for?’ By making a phone call you’d know exactly what you were paying for,” she said.
But Carbone called the Ker example a case of poor disclosure.
“Someone in the 12 years should have said to her ‘These are the products and services on your phone bill,’ ” he said.
Ker, a longtime elementary school psychologist who retired in June, acknowledges that her inattention may have contributed to the problem. Also, she says she’s not sure if she returned the phone, and has no receipt. GTE says they have no record of her returning the phone.
Pacific Bell, the dominant local phone company in Southern California, got out of the telephone-leasing business in the years leading up to the landmark 1984 decision that split up AT&T; to create a network of “Baby Bells.”
Nearly all other major local telephone companies have followed suit. Today, GTE is the only large local phone company to offer leasing as a residential option, according to figures from GTE and the U.S. Telephone Assn., a 102-year-old trade group.
Even though phones cost as little as $10, nearly 2 million of GTE’s 14 million residential customers nationwide are still leasing telephones, the company said.
As for other charges that appear on a Pac Bell bill, a spokesman said the company uses language approved by the Public Utilities Commission and tries to be “as clear as possible.”
“We encourage people to read their bills very, very closely,” said Pac Bell spokesman Steve Getzug. “With in excess of 10 million customers [statewide], we can’t speculate that what’s being billed is what the customer ordered.”
He said the company relies on customers to raise questions if something looks amiss.
Ker credits friend Sam Hollander, a Studio City resident who turns 82 next week, with noticing the charge.
Hollander said GTE initially offered to stop levying the fee but did not propose a refund. Later, after Hollander became upset, the company offered a refund of six months, or about $20.
Linda Woods, manager of the consumer affairs branch of the state PUC, said the agency occasionally gets calls from consumers like Ker who “finally caught on,” but the number is dwindling.
Like the FCC, the PUC is interested in making phone bills easier to understand, Woods said.
“It’s an item of discussion around here,” she said. “It is a concern, but there are no formal [commission] proceedings that I know of.”
The FCC’s attention was drawn to the issue of fuzzy phone bill language by two practices born, in part, of deregulation: “slamming,” the unauthorized switching of a consumer’s long-distance service, and “cramming,” or billing for services never ordered.
An FCC spokesman said the truth-in-billing order requires that consumers be told clearly the services they are being billed for. The order is expected to go into effect after the FCC works out details with the Office of Management and Budget.
Carbone said easy-to-read phone bills will eventually become a selling point for phone companies.
“Every single month, the company that is going to capture the market is the one that will effectively communicate with their customer in a way that doesn’t require a PhD in telephone,” Carbone said.
