The Australian Communications and Media Authority, which announced the fine overnight, said the behaviour stretched over 11 years and was “just not good enough”.
The telco regulator said Telstra had refunded $17.7 million, with a further $3.4 million due by the end of the year.
The company had wrongly billed more than 6500 customers $2600 each, on average, between April 2012 and August 2023, ACMA said, and chair Nerida O’Loughlin said the regulator had lost patience.
“Telstra has a history of incorrectly billing customers and it’s just not good enough,” O’Loughlin said.
“At a time when many small businesses are facing economic pressures, unaccounted costs can create very real stress and financial hardship.”
“All telcos must have robust billing systems in place to ensure that consumers, including small businesses, are only paying for agreed and active services.”
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It’s the third time the authority has made a ruling against Telstra, after finding in 2020 that the telco had wrongly billed 10,000 customers almost $2.5 million and in 2022 that 11,000 had been stung $1.7 million.
In a statement, Telstra Global Business Services Group Executive Dean Salter said the billing errors were a result of an improper “deactivation process”.
“Getting something as important as billing wrong isn’t acceptable, and this is clearly not the experience we want to be providing our customers,” Salter said.
“These ADSL billing errors occurred because we didn’t follow the proper deactivation process, including when some customers migrated to the NBN, which resulted in some customers being charged for inactive services.
“We’ve reached out to our customers to explain what went wrong and what we’re doing to fix it, including refunding them for the incorrect charges with interest.
“We know our customers deserve better, which is why we reported the issue to ACMA and conducted our own extensive investigation. We have put new controls in place to prevent this issue from happening again, including monthly checks if ADSL services are being used by customers before they’re billed.
“We’ve let these customers down. We apologise for this, and it’s clear we need to do better.”
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