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Customer Asks For Itemized Bill, Verizon Tells Her To Get a Subpoena
suraj.sun writes with this quote from an article at Techdirt:
"A woman, who called Verizon to try to find out about the $4.19 she was being charged for six local calls, was told by Verizon reps that the only way it would provide her an itemized bill was to get a lawyer and have the lawyer get a subpoena to force Verizon to disclose the information. Instead, the woman went to court (by herself) and a judge told Verizon (.docx) to hand over the itemized bill info. 'It is a basic matter of fair business practice that a consumer should be able to contact a utility about a charge on a bill and learn what the charge is for and learn that the charge was correctly applied. The only verification that Verizon's witness could offer that a charge like [the customer's] $4.19 measured use charge was accurate and billed correctly was her faith in the accuracy of Verizon's computer system. The only way that Verizon would offer any information about a past charge in response to a consumer inquiry was to require that customer to hire a lawyer and subpoena their own usage information. By no reasonable standard could this be considered reasonable customer service."
Have you been to Canada recently? Our government is more in the pockets of corporations, as least in regard to utilities and wireless service, that the U.S. could ever dream of.
Except for healthcare. We have that part covered.
I'm a physician and I couldn't figure out what the charges meant on my last hospital bill. Turns out the hospital couldn't either. They had to drop the charges. This sort of thing happens all of the time and I'm constantly telling patients to look at their bills and appeal things that don't make sense. Ah, American medicine. The best there is ....
Only if you want it in print, you can view it for free on your myverizon.com website.