AT&T (Again) Caught Cheating Federal Subsidy Program For Poor People
from the very-on-brand dept
Stop me if you’ve heard this one before: a giant U.S. telecom monopoly has been ripping off a federal program designed to help the country’s low income residents. AT&T last week quietly struck a $2.3 million consent decree with the FCC for falsely inflating the number of people it was helping under a COVID-era program designed to make broadband more affordable for poor people.
During the pandemic, the government created the Emergency Broadband Benefit Program (EBB), which provided a $50 discount off the broadband bills of low-income Americans. AT&T used several different ways to falsely inflate the amount of users actually enrolled in the program to grab extra money it didn’t deserve. Then lied about it.
When contacted by Ars Technica in a bid for comment, AT&T spokespeople would only praise the company for participating in the program:
“When the federal government acted during the COVID-19 pandemic to stand up the Emergency Broadband Benefit program, and then the Affordable Connectivity Program, we quickly implemented both programs to provide more low-cost Internet options for our customers.”
In just the last decade, AT&T has been fined $18.6 million for helping rip off programs for the hearing impaired; fined $10.4 million for ripping off a different program for low-income families; fined $105 million for helping “crammers” by intentionally making such bogus charges more difficult to see on customer bills; and fined $60 million for lying to customers about the definition of “unlimited” data.
There’s also employee allegations the company has been ripping off school subsidy programs for years; allegations I’ve yet to see meaningfully investigated. And earlier this year, AT&T was fined another $23 million after executives were caught bribing Illinois officials to get favorable broadband regulation in the state.
AT&T is one of several companies currently trying to get out of federal obligations attached to infrastructure bill subsides designed to aid poor Americans. And they’re at the forefront of Supreme Court backed efforts to permanently defang what’s left of U.S. regulatory independence and authority. I wonder why?
Filed Under: ACP, broadband, ebb, fcc, high speed internet, subsidies, telecom
Companies: at&t
Comments on “AT&T (Again) Caught Cheating Federal Subsidy Program For Poor People”
Nope, is just they’ve also counted people after they’ve paid more than $50 a month for broadband, so there is much more poor people than officially estimated.
I suspect that the cheating created far more revenue than the fines… Just another grift, which seems to have become much too common.
Why are there no criminal charges?
So I see the company has to pay a fine. Which is about all you can really do to the company as an entity itself, but what about the employees who actually committed the fraud?
This is clear fraud. And regardless of whether the company was complicit (probably hard to prove) or just negligent in policing it’s employees actions, the employees who inflated the numbers were committing fraud. Why aren’t they being held criminally accountable?
The company as a whole may not be all that concerned about these fines, but if the employees involved could face criminal liability, then I imagine you would see a lot less of this kind of behavior.
Re:
And just how can you arrest and jail a corporation on criminal charges?
Re: Re:
Receivership
Re: Re:
Arrest and jail the corporation’s CEO and any others on the board with a similar level of responsibility for the offenses, obvs.
Would really like
That the Gov. would REALLY cause Pain to the corps that Screw up.
Millions??? REALLY?
They pass this on to consumers.
Do something that HURTS THEM. ENFORCE the things they are SUPPOSED TO BE DOING.
We have Automated customer service no more Assistance operators as there are LESS HARDWIRED Phones. There is little chance that 1 person has 1 phone number, forever.
Take their Profit for the WHOLE YEAR and CUT their stocks. Force a re-evaluation of the company worth for the stock exchange and DROP their Internal STOCK VALUE.
One would think that subsidy removal would be on the table after several past issues wrt said subsidy.
Re: Internally
Corps have turned to Stocks for money.
Pay the Top people with over inflated stock, only Available with Ownership, Internally.
And they go up every time they Re-evaluate the corps.
the TAX on the Stocks to REDEEM them is 15%, not 20-30%.
Hit those and ALL retired Boss’s will fall into it also.
Make the punishment more painful please....
AT&T had profits of up and over 6 billion last year. These are just the cost of doing business until they start adding in fines equal to the cost of a person’s time in jail as they won’t arrest a whole company for fraud. What is a CEO salary for 5-10? Add that onto the fine please.