Sprint Overcounted Low-Income Customers for Years

Sprint has for years failed to accurately measure how many of the low-income Americans it serves through the federal Lifeline program actually use their phones. The company is facing a potential settlement with the Federal Communications Commission after the regulator in September said Sprint improperly collected “tens of millions” of dollars in federal subsidies for 885,000 Lifeline customers who weren’t using the service. The carrier said its error was caused by a 2017 inadvertent coding issue in the system it used to measure customer usage. But Sprint also made mistakes in tallying how many subscribers were using their Lifeline service in 2013 and 2014. Because of an error in how it counted usage at the time, spam texts could keep dormant accounts live and allow Sprint to continue to collect subsidies for those customers, the documents show. In one case, the phone of an Oregon woman who died months earlier was still deemed active.