According to a news story from MEDIANEWS, the CPUC is failing to collect court-ruled fines against phone companies. The result is a slap in the face to all California consumers. It's no wonder that telecom company penalties/fines are not collected by the California Public Utilities Commission when you consider that most of the staff is kept busy finding ways to support "market competition" has reduced the need for regulations. If staff is busy conducting bill clinics, workshops, posting consumer information on its website and creating task forces to research problems, who is left to take complaints and collect fines? According to the CPUC Consumer protection Initiative, there is a new enforcement division. In addition, the agency has continued to hire staff to keep up with the tremendous backlog of complaints. There are more technologies and fewer companies due to mergers. The PUC has made it clear by its lack of action, that the major telecom companies are free to do whatever they choose and charge what they want. There are mounds of papers in baskets on and near desks at the CPUC due to backlogged complaints caused from a PUC selected company to manage the low-income Lifeline system throughout the state. The companies were doing this job just fine. Now there are massive problems taking up company rep time, management time and PUC staff time. Last year, the PUC was backlogged by close to 30,000 complaints. Today, who knows for sure? It is inexcusable that CA fails to hold companies found guilty of deceiving the public and/or violating PUC regulations known as "tariffs", that putting on a show for the public to prove rules are not needed is more important than collecting the fines to either return to defrauded consumers or collect money to put into funds for consumer education.

The CPUC owes CA consumers the collection of fines. Because companies are mandated to report slamming and cramming violations to the CPUC we should be able to see the entire list of complaints by company posted on its website.

sam