The CNC Does Not Know How to Control the Telephone Companies
<p><span style="line-height: 20.8px;">The AGN detected that the body responsible for overseeing the communications industry does not use the technology needed to verify compliance of the service, nor do they have procedure manuals indicating the details of their work, their inspections are "ineffective" and there are delays in the penalties for the provider’s irregularities.</span></p>
A report from the General Audit Office (AGN, for its acronym in Spanish) states that The National Communications Commission, the body responsible for controlling the telecommunications industry, makes "little or no" use of computer technologies to verify compliance with the Basic Telephone Service (SBT, for its acronym in Spanish) provided by the companies Telecom and Telefonica.
The SBT is the provision of fixed links that are part of, or are connected to, the telephone network, and includes subscriptions, metered services, public telephones, and international long distance. It is also the category that has most impact on the annual accounts of companies. In 2005 for example, sales for Telefónica totaled $ 3,367 million, of which 60%, more than $ 2,000 million, corresponded to SBT. On Telecom’s side, that year, they billed $113 million of that total, 64.4% was for the SBT.
While the overall quality of the SBT Regulation provides for checks to verify the level of service, the AGN could not verify that the Commission met these inspections. According to the report, the CNC has no procedure manuals that indicate how they control the providers, which is to say it does not know how to do what they have to do.
"The controls on companies are inefficient, ineffective, and wasteful," states the Audit and links these "weaknesses" to the Commission "not having the capacity to respond to the dynamism of the technologies used by the enterprises" under its orbit.
A telephone exchange takes, on average, annual transactions exceeding 40 million minutes of communication. Each call generates a set of data to be audited, as the start time and end time, numbers of origin and destination, and fare. "The handling of this volume of data, the report explains, can only be done effectively with the support of computers and specialized applications”. Therefore, the AGN concluded that "it is necessary to establish consistent technological advancement procedures and also increase the intensity of inspections".
Moreover, the Audit found that if there is an irregularity against the providers, the Commission’s sanctions "expand beyond the limits laid down in the rules". For example, the final step of a procedure initiated by forfeit occurred on September 21 but was registered on May 31, 2006; and another, which began on February 27, 2004, moved for the last time on June 6, 2006. The report said it did not find "any reason to justify the delays" and "adjudicative acts" are enacted on dossiers, and completed that, the system of internal audit of the CNC "is weak".