Posted on 12/03/2019 4:18:48 AM PST by karpov
Sprint Corp. has for years failed to accurately measure how many of the low-income Americans it serves through the federal Lifeline program actually use their phones, according to regulatory documents reviewed by The Wall Street Journal.
The No. 4 U.S. wireless carrier by subscribers is facing a potential settlement with the Federal Communications Commission after the regulator in September said Sprint improperly collected “tens of millions” of dollars in federal subsidies for 885,000 Lifeline customers who weren’t using the service. The carrier said its error was caused by a 2017 inadvertent coding issue in the system it used to measure customer usage.
But Sprint also made mistakes in tallying how many subscribers were using their Lifeline service in 2013 and 2014, documents obtained by the Journal through a public information request show.
Because of an error in how it counted usage at the time, spam texts could keep dormant accounts live and allow Sprint to continue to collect subsidies for those customers, the documents show. In one case, the phone of an Oregon woman who died months earlier was still deemed active.
In Oregon alone, correcting that mistake at the time triggered the loss of more than 4,600 Lifeline subscribers for the company, according to the documents. “The failure was systemic and not confined to Oregon,” a then-senior counsel at Sprint wrote in a September 2014 email to officials at the state Public Utility Commission who asked about the matter.
It couldn’t be determined how many customers Sprint shed nationally after the problem was discovered. Sprint declined to comment on the scope of the subscriber loss at the time.
Sprint, which provides Lifeline service through its Assurance Wireless brand, was never fined by the FCC for that mistake.
(Excerpt) Read more at wsj.com ...
I know how to stop this from happening.
Inadvertent my Aunt Fanny.
L
I thought they collected it every month from my phone bill my whole adult life.
Around here, all of the diverse ‘poor’ folks have an 0phone.
Wow, it’d be pretty easy to sign up an inactive phone for spam text instead of closing it.
It’s an unholy alliance between government programs and big business. Just as Walmart loves the EBT money that gets spent in their stores.
A cheap phone for ‘lifeline’ services yet the ‘poor’ customers have money for unlimited data as well as tattoos.
Why do welfare parasites get free cell phones in the first place?
Not to mention the ones I’ve seen buying lobster, filet mignon, fine wines by the multiple shopping cart loads, covered w/ gold jewelry and driving $90k Caddy Escalades. Life is good for them, being “poor”.
But then we Gay Staters are surprised...the former president of the Massachusetts State Senate (and bother of the late serial killer,Whitey Bulger) Billy Bulger is collecting a $250,000/yr pension from state taxpayers despite having taken the 5th several dozen times in from of a US Congressional Committee.
Amazing, but not surprising, isn’t it?
It started with 911 emergency service and grew like a cancer. Think “bread and circuses”.
Tracking.
I hope that this affects the Sprint and T-Mobile merger that is soon to be litigated.
If Hildabeast had won that election absolutely none of this would be happening.
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