The Audit General Office found that "for every peso acquired, the mobile companies pay $0.035 as tariffs for Station Rights and Systems and Electric Radio Services". In addition, although this amount has not been updated since 2001 -before the end of the parity between the peso and the dollar- minute phone prices have been adjusted several times.

The watchdog recommended "updating the value to the new parameters of the economy."

Last week, The Auditor announces some irregularities detected by the AGN in their study of the prepaid billing service and prices paid by cell phone use. But there's more. The watchdog detected, that the mobile phone companies "did not report the number of cards sold or their value."

As of August 2010, the month in which the National Communications Commission (CNC, for its acronym in Spanish) implemented a sworn statement, "each company presented the data according to their own criteria." However, the audit found that "some providers are still not informing the required information" and that despite this "no action has been verified by the CNC."

In this regard, the company Movistar deserves a separate paragraph. It is the company that "sells the most phones and prepaid cards but has the lower billing and revenue declared". This caught the attention of Auditors who recommended "a verification of the data provided" especially because since the new form of sworn statements went into effect "there was an important decrease of calling cards sold compared to historical values ." In January 2010, before the implementation of the new statement, Movistar reported selling 18.5 million cards. In August came into force the new modality and by October they declared selling 3.7 million, in November 4 and by December they said they had sold 4.2.

Controls

From the Management Control of the CNC they informed the federal watchdog that "for technical and competency issues, audits performed should not cover aspects of the system or go beyond the analysis of accounting related to billing."

This is not new, in 2008 an audit was performed to Telecom Personal, and the auditors of the Communications Commission said that "they had merely a mathematical verification and the data provided by the company based on the amount of subscribers could not be verified from the accounting records of the company.”