Deal or No Deal, Corporate America Pays for Premium Text Messaging and other Services

Are you paying for employees "premium" text messaging and other "premium" services? I bet your answer would be a resounding no. You might say, "we have a corporate or government plan and the phones are owned and supplied to the employee for business use only." And while a reasonable amount of personal calls and texting would be ok, "premium" charges like ringtones, games, premium text messaging and other charges would certainly not be ok. You may even monitor it and/or have blocked access to those features but...

We process invoices, lots of invoices and we extract all those little granular details from the invoices and then run software to scrutinize every little expense for accuracy and to flag any "premium" charges. Guess what? We find lots and lots of "premium" charges. Most companies simply don't have the time to manually review every charge.

Here are a few "premium" charges from a recent invoice:

99 cents Deal or No Deal - There's now a class action lawsuit that's made its way all the way to the Georgia Supreme Court. The charges keep showing up on bills however.

$9.99 - Thumbplay - Internet Games

Some other usage charges:

Roadside assistance $2.00

International picture text - 35 cents

International text - 15 cents

And of course there's the old standard:

Directory Assistance - $1.49

Why not direct users to dial 800-GOOG411 (800-466-4411) or 800-Free411 (800-373-3411) instead.

Usage charges on this $14,000 170 user invoice amounted to over 15% of all charges. Many of those usage charges could be eliminated by simply blocking the service or educating users on alternative ways to dial calls.

Not sure if your being billed for premium services and other non business related charges? Then sign up for our free trial and find out. Just send us up to 3 invoices and we'll process them and post the results for free.