RBOC Accounting Mystery Resurfaces
- Eug�nie Larson, Reporter, Light Reading
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Just as all the ruckus around the 2002 carrier accounting scandals had
started to die down, a ghost from Christmas past has shown up, claiming
that
the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) helped hide fraudulent
accounting by regional Bells when it prematurely closed an audit of the
companies in 2000.
Daniel Berninger, the managing director and editor of Pulver.com, filed
a
petition with the FCC on December 23, 2002, asking that it reopen the
RBOC
Continuing Property Records (CPR) audits it closed in November 2000. The
audits revealed that more than $18 billion in the RBOCs' inventory
reports
could not be verified. This could cause significant over-charging of
RBOC
customers, according to Berninger.
Berninger, who also recently published a 233-page report outlining his
charges against the FCC and the RBOCs, insists that there has never
been any
doubt that the audits showed large discrepancies between the hard-wired
equipment the regional Bells claimed to have in their central offices
and
the equipment the 70-person strong audit team actually found there.
"It's
all documented," Berninger says. "It's all [in the FCC-filings]. It's
all in
black and white."
According to FCC records, the auditors concluded that about $5 billion
worth
of equipment was unaccounted for. In addition, an estimated $13 billion
of
inventory had been categorized by the Bells as "undetailed investment"
and
"unallocated other costs," making it impossible to figure out how the
money
had actually been spent.
<snip>
http://www.lightreading.com/document.asp?site=lightreading&doc_id=26395
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