I work in my company's corporate IT group and have just recently due to a turnover in our accounts payable begun to review all of our telecom RBOC bills in several states. I began to notice repeated entries for a company called USBI, with charges of approx $18.00 a month.
Being the curious type and not afraid to admit I don't know something, I called the phone numbers provided on the bills to find out what it was my company was paying for and who these other providers were. When I called I received very "vague" explanations of what the service was (especially from USBI).in most cases on our Verizon bills, the explanation was that the charge was for national long distance service. When I explained that we already had a national LD agreement with AT&T to cover our long distance usage USBI would maintain "someone" in our company requested the service.
Just yesterday I found a brand new charge this month from USBI on our Verizon Mt Arlington NJ office bill. Again when I called I was told this was for a national LD service and had been requested by an individual whose name that was given does not work for our company. Again I explained we had this service already from AT&T. The person on the phone then surprised me by trying to justify these USBI expenses by maintaining that while it was true that only one provider could bill you for your actual usage, it was perfectly legal for multiple providers to bill for the same service even if it wasn't actually used.
Needless to say I have gotten these charges discontinued and requested refunds.
In another similar situation related to our Atlanta GA office on a Bell South bill, I found a charge from a company called Integretel referred me to another company called National Broadband Web Casting (NBWC) who maintained we had requested and were paying for web hosting from them. They were at a loss for words when I explained we ourselves did web hosting in our Atlanta GA office so it made no sense why we would pay another company to do it for us (we do not outsource any of this work). Also NBWC was unable to give me the URL of the alleged web site they were maintaining for us and could not produce a specific name of any one of our employees who ordered the service.
I had never heard or seen any of these companies before, so of course I began to research and discovered our experience was not isolated or unique.in our case we are receiving over 30 separate telecomm bills every month and unfortunately up to recently no one who was handling the payments questioned the bills. Obviously that has now changed. We are now centralizing our telecomm and each one is inspected and questioned before being paid.
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