SMALL CARRIERS ARGUE WITH VERIZON OVER AUDIT-COST ACCOUNTING

摘要

The FCC should allow rate-of-return carriers to allocate federal audit expenses completely to interstate jurisdiction, said small carriers supporting a petition by the National Telecommunications Cooperative Association. The change would make recovery of audit expenses more certain and would save small companies time and money, they said. Interstate allocation "will preclude the problems of regulatory lag and uncertainty with seeking to recover a portion of those costs on the intrastate side through the costly and lengthy rate case procedures for rate-of-return regulated companies," said the Missouri Small Telephone Company Group of 22 carriers. Audits are expensive, it added. One member, Mark Twain Rural Telephone, paid $47,500 for its most recent audit, and others have paid more than $30,000, it said. Existing FCC rules direct Mark Twain to allocate 35 percent of audit costs to intrastate, it said. nnBut Verizon condemned the petition as having "no basis" and urged the FCC to do away with jurisdictional separations. Verizon said federal Universal Service Fund audit costs are properly divided between interstate and intrastate jurisdictions. "The subsidies that flow from the USF are indeed federal dollars collected from consumers across the country, but the use of this support is not limited to interstate facilities," it said. About half of the $4 billion USF high-cost fund is paid to NTCA members and other rate-of-return carriers through the high cost loop and local switching support programs, Verizon said. The high cost loop program supports facilities used for interstate and intrastate calls, while the local switching support program subsidizes local facilities, it said. There's no evidence that any state has banned carriers from recovering federal USF audit costs, Verizon said. In "reality," it said, the small carriers want to recover all audit costs from interstate "because these costs would then be substantially covered by interstate access rates paid by wireless providers and IXCs, and generally not by NTCA members' end-users."