Miami Herald: Phone company fined for overcharges
Aug 18, 2009
Posted on Tue, Aug. 18, 2009
BY MARY ELLEN KLAS
Herald/Times Tallahassee Bureau
A phone company accused of overcharging Miami-Dade jail inmates and their families for collect calls has agreed to pay $1.25 million in settlement fees to state regulators.
The Public Service Commission staff estimates that TCG Public Communications charged as much as $6.3 million in the excessive phone fees between 2001 and 2007.
TCG denies it did anything wrong but if the Public Service Commission approves the fine as expected at its hearing today, the company will agree to have its inmate call service monitored for 18 months.
According to the investigation by the PSC, inmates who made collect calls out of prisons in Miami-Dade over the seven-year period often had their calls prematurely disconnected.
Each time they tried to complete the call, a new connection fee of between $2.25 and $1.75 would be charged.
One person complained to the PSC that she was charged more than $100 in connection fees after 40 to 45 dropped calls, records show.
“It’s always a balance with providing public safety and security and providing access to inmates,” said Chris Kise, a former legal advisor to Gov. Charlie Crist whom TCG hired to represent its case before state regulators.
“The company has worked diligently with staff over the past year to reach an agreement that balances the interests of all parties,” Kise said.
Investigators concluded it may have been a flaw in the phone system software that caused the dropped calls but while the PSC began investigating a consumer complaint in 2004, the software wasn’t replaced until 2008.
The software was designed to prevent inmates from calling numbers that law enforcement and corrections officers wanted blocked.
When an inmate used calling features, such as three-way calling, to get around the blocked numbers, the call was supposed to disconnect. But investigators suspect that thousands of calls were unintentionally dropped as well.
In 2005, the company told the PSC that 17 percent of the inmate calls were “disconnected due to the three-way call detection software,” according to a staff report. When the PSC investigated again in late 2007, “staff was unable to ascertain if the company took any actions to mitigate the failure of the system to properly detect three-way calls,” the report said.
The PSC began investigating a consumer complaint in 2004, when the company was owned by AT&T Communications. In 2005, AT&T sold the company to TCG’s parent company, GlobalTel*Link Corporation. In 2007, TCG offered to settle the PSC complaint for $175,000 — an offer the PSC staff opposed.
By 2008, PSC commissioners ordered the company to work out a settlement with PSC staff. But during this time, PSC investigators estimated that the company continued to collect substantial revenue for the dropped calls, a staff report said.
The PSC staff’s first recommendation was for a $1.3 million fine and $6.3 million refund that would use calling data to determine which individuals were entitled to a refund. But TCG objected, arguing that it was nearly impossible to determine which calls were cut off prematurely by the software and which were disconnected by the parties.