SALT LAKE CITY (ABC 4 News) - It was a surprise for one Utah small business. Its AT&T phone bill is 120 times more than usual. Rubber Technologies claims it tried everything to find a solution with the phone company, then called ABC 4 asking for help
Employees at Rubber Technologies are scratching their heads saying it's not possible for them to rack up a $30,000 phone bill that's now grown to nearly $70,000. All the charges were accrued over the last two months. Office Manager Luann Inkley says, “The bill does not even make any sense at all logically.”
The November bill shows that on October 15th one of the phone lines made dozens of calls to Nevada. They were all placed at the same time and all lasting 24 hours. The December bill shows the same thing. Company leaders are baffled, saying it’s not physically possible.
They say they’ve done everything they can to get the charges dropped. They’ve had technicians from both Qwest and Connect Communications inspect their phone system. Both have deemed that the problem is not on the company’s end.
Still, AT&T hasn't budged. Inkley says, “We've been rejected three times saying it's not a billing error.” CEO Larry Swift says Rubber Technologies simply doesn't have the kind of money to pay a bill of this size. Swift says, “If for some reason we end up having to pay this we'll have no choice but to have to lay people off.”
We called AT&T to try and get some answers. They sent us this statement, "Multiple companies are involved in providing service to this customer and we intend to work very closely with them to determine if/where a problem exists so it can be resolved as soon as possible."
Rubber Technologies had this problem before with AT&T in July. AT&T did credit the company then.
