The Minn. PUC is to consider at its June 30 meeting a complaint b...

The Minn. PUC is to consider at its June 30 meeting a complaint by the Minn. Dept. of Commerce against the state’s major interexchange carriers alleging that the intrastate access recovery charge they billed to their customers was misleading, inaccurate and discriminatory. The agency asked the PUC to order an end to the charge on the grounds that it violated federal truth in billing regulations and state laws that required charges to be applied uniformly. The state Commerce Dept. said the fee was billed in the section for govt.-mandated surcharges and taxes, giving consumers the false impression it was a tax that couldn’t be avoided by changing carriers. The agency also said the fee discriminated because it wasn’t applied to business service and was waived for residential customers who also took their local service from the IXC. The IXCs responded by saying the failure in Minn. to reform access charges, coupled with legal requirements for uniform statewide interexchange service rates regardless of access costs, forced them to institute the access recovery fees to make themselves whole. The carriers said they gave their customers plenty of advance notice about the fee and described it fully. They also said they weren’t unlawfully discriminating in applying the fee because business interexchange service was provided over combinations of switched and dedicated facilities while residential service was only through switched access. The carriers also said using a fee waiver to encourage subscription to multiple services was no different in principle from discounting the individual services that made up a bundled offering.