Confusing Phone Bills Are Couple’s Hang-Up

GRANADA HILLS — Wilma Ker figures she knows how to read English just fine. But when it comes to telephone-ese, it took her 12 years to get the message.

The Granada Hills resident has paid her telephone company, GTE, a monthly fee for renting a rotary telephone that she stopped using at least a decade ago.

She hadn’t realized she was still paying $3.40 a month for the clunky pre-cellular relic because her phone bill carried a vague line saying only “equipment rental.”

“I suppose I should have been more aware,” Ker acknowledged, adding that the matter might never have come to light had it not been for a persistent beau with an inquiring mind. “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.”

Now Ker, 71, and her significant other, Sam Hollander, a Studio City resident who turns 82 next week, are trying to recoup more than $400 in phone rental fees (enough money to buy 40 phones), 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 using a rented GTE phone.

Consumer advocates say Ker’s case points up an unfortunate byproduct of telephone deregulation: With today’s dizzying array of telephone options and services, a phone bill can resemble a tax accountant’s ledger.

“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.

“I just assumed they knew what they were doing.”

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.

To make phone bills easier to understand, and to help stamp out increasing fraud and confusion, the Federal Communications Commission has adopted new guidelines that would bring about “truth in billing.” The measure, among other things, 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.”

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, she said. That practice has since been discontinued, but Wilson was not certain when or why.

“We really have done quite a bit of notification,” Wilson said. “We really are trying to do the best we can for the customer.”

Wilson also said that the matter could have been cleared up years ago, had Ker or Hollander 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 phones. She has no receipts, and GTE said its records do not indicate that she returned the phone.

Pacific Telephone, precursor to 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. (Some customers were allowed to continue leasing through the late 1980s.)

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.

“And we encourage people to read their bills very, very closely,” Pac Bell spokesman Steve Getzug said. “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.

When Hollander finally did raise the question, he and Ker were shocked at the response. 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 occasionally the agency gets calls from consumers like Ker who “finally caught on,” but the number is dwindling.

Like the FCC, the state PUC also 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 what services they are being asked to pay for. The order is expected to go into effect after the FCC works out details with the Office of Management and Budget.

Carbone said that in the future, offering easy-to-read phone bills will become a phone company selling point--a way for companies to distinguish themselves in the crowded telecom marketplace. So in addition to worrying about the clarity of their calls, he said, more companies will be worried about the clarity of their bills.

“Every single month, the company that is going to capture the market is the one that will effectively communicate with their customer,” Carbone said. “In a way that doesn’t require a Ph.D. in telephone.”

Valley @ Work runs each Tuesday. Karen Robinson-Jacobs can be e-mailed at Karen.R[email protected].