Grameenphone has failed to recover unpaid bills worth around Tk100 crore from its 575,000 post-paid subscribers since its inception in 1997.
The country’s leading mobile phone operator, which is now having around five crore customers across the country, is now trying to recover the outstanding bills by appointing a third-party.
The operator has already requested Bangladesh Telecommunication Regulator Commission (BTRC) to allow it to appoint a firm for collecting the bills. The regulator has not yet given necessary approval, according to a letter the company sent to the BTRC recently.
“We hope BTRC to approve the request soon so we can go for collecting the dues,” a senior executive told the Dhaka Tribune. Apart from Grameenphone, some other operators were claimed to have appointed agents to realise due bills without having prior permission from the regulator.
“From 1997 till date Grameenphone has debt amount of Tk1 billion (approx) from about 575,000 debt accounts,” reads the letter.
“Grameenphone currently recovers post-paid bad debt using its internal resources. However, with the given resources the total customer-base could not be reached and thus a significant number of the customers remain untouched for collecting such debt while the numbers are piling up.”
Meanwhile, GP has uploaded a Request for Proposal (RFP) while waiting for BTRC’s approval to appoint such an agent to recover the unpaid bills from the debt accounts.
As per GP’s plan, an appointed agent will go through the subscriber’s forms, call details information and try to contact with those subscribers who have dues.
If the agent failed to collect any information of his or her details or not able to detect them, then they will try to find out that subscribers using information from the related FnF numbers and later on it will try to contact directly with the original subscribers, said the sources. But it is learnt the regulator has already raised a question on the issue of confidentiality of subscriber’s personal information.
To address this issue, GP has already assured the telecom watchdog of signing a non-discloser agreement with the agent to make sure that there would be no misuse or leakage of information by the agent.
According to GP’s proposal, if needed to collect the outstanding bills the third party will be allowed to perform duties such as visiting the customer physically, phone follow up, SMS and letter through E-mail follow up with that particular customer.
As soon as GP got approval from BTRC, subscribers who have outstanding bills will also get a notice from GP within a short time. One the other hand, lots of subscribers have deposited thousands of taka as security money for every connection although the connections are not active currently.
BTRC has already reportedly questioned the GP to know the whereabouts of such huge amount of money which has long been remained with GP as security money.
BTRC is going to issue a letter to all the operators asking them to inform it about the figure of the deposited security money and also to take necessary steps to refund the money back to the respective subscribers.