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Report: FCC Failing To Resolve Consumer Complaints

Agency spars with investigators over allegations of poor follow-through

By Martin H. Bosworth
ConsumerAffairs.com

March 14, 2008
The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) has increasingly been positioning itself as one of the few avenues for consumer redress in recent years.

Even as the agency often supports preempting state laws enabling investigation and enforcement of consumer complaints, it offers itself up as the means for frustrated citizens to demand action on issues ranging from identity theft to bad cable service.

But a new report from the Government Accountability Office (GAO) alleges that the FCC may receive hundreds of thousands of complaints, but does a poor job of following through and tracking them to resolution.

According to the GAO, though the FCC processed 95 percent of the complaints it received, opened up 46,000 investigations, and closed 39,000 between 2003 and 2006, 83 percent of the cases were closed without any enforcement action.

"[The] FCC has not set measurable enforcement goals, developed a well-defined enforcement strategy, or established performance measures that are linked to the enforcement goals," the GAO said. "Limitations in FCC's current approach for collecting and analyzing enforcement data constitute the principal challenge FCC faces in providing complete and accurate information on its enforcement program."

Among the GAO's findings:

• The FCC received a total of 454,000 complaints in the three-year review period, from a low of 86,000 in 2003 to a high of 132,000 in 2005. The FCC levied $73 million in fines and payments through settlements, of which about $53 million has been collected.

• The FCC uses five separate databases and manually searches tens of thousands of paper case files to track case progress and ensure enforcement within the cases' statutes of limitations. The GAO criticized the agency for using incompatible systems that limited its overall effectiveness.

• 65 percent of the complaints received dealt with violations of the Do-Not-Call list and receiving solicitations during forbidden hours. The next highest category was complaints about telephone service, both landline and wireless, with a high of 36,000 in 2004.

• 9 percent of the cases investigated ended with enforcement actions being taken; of the FCC's wide repertoire of potential remedies in an investigation, it chiefly relied upon admonishments and warnings, rather than orders to cease and desist.

• The GAO found that "the amount of the fines and payments negotiated through consent decrees decreased, from about $25 million in 2003 and $26 million in 2004, to almost $11 million in 2005 and $12 million in 2006—a decrease of more than 50 percent."

The FCC offered a 109-page response to the GAO report, questioning the GAO's methodology and conclusions while trumpeting its own achievements in handling consumer complaints. The FCC said it had collected $65 million in fines, forefeitures, and fees since the beginning of current chairman Kevin Martin's tenure, and now "responds to 100 percent of consumer complaints."

"During Chairman Martin's tenure, the Commission has implemented standardized enforcement performance goals to better manage the enforcement process and automate portions of this process," Enforcement Bureau chief Kris Monteith said.

House probe

The GAO report comes on the heels of the continuing investigation of the FCC by the House Energy & Commerce Committee over charges that the agency has not been acting to handle consumer complaints in a timely fashion.

Commerce Committee chairman John Dingell said that "When more than 80 percent of complaints investigated by the FCC are closed without any meaningful enforcement action, and it isn't possible to determine why no action was taken, then it appears that the FCC has abdicated its duty to protect consumers."

The GAO report was commissioned at the behest of Congressman Ed Markey (D-MA), in his capacity as Telecommunications Subcommittee chairman for the House Energy & Commerce Committee. Markey issued a response to the report, stating that "Without an effective FCC enforcement program, consumers are left out in the cold."

"[T]he GAO's report makes clear that any legislation establishing national consumer protection rules for the wireless market, must have meaningful, supplementary enforcement at the state level. Unfortunately, solely relying upon FCC enforcement for consumer protection is utterly unreasonable in light of the GAO's findings," Markey said.

Markey had recently introduced legislation to strengthen consumer protection laws on the state and national level for wireless communications providers, including a stronger enforcement role for the FCC. He also introduced a bill guaranteeing that Internet users could access all content equally under the "net neutrality provision," which tasks the FCC to investigate claims of content blocking by service providers.

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