Verizon suing Covad over alleged false complaints

Verizon Communications has filed a lawsuit alleging that Covad Communications has intentionally filed tens of thousands of false reports blaming the incumbent carrier for Covad’s own service problems.

According to William Barr, Verizon’s general counsel, the allegedly false reports were part of a “deliberate scheme by Covad’s management to formally and publicly report as attributable to the ILEC, or Verizon, Covad’s own service failures. They did that to shift the cost of their own service failures to Verizon.”

Twenty-six former Covad employees have signed affidavits supporting that claim, said Barr. Verizon is seeking unspecified damages and an injunction to halt this activity.

A majority of the reports in question concern instances when a Covad technician encountered obstacles in setting up DSL service at a customer’s site. Covad employees, said Barr, were instructed by management to file a trouble ticket with the ILEC even when the problem was due to Covad’s service.

According to Barr, 22,000 false reports were filed in 2000 alone. Most of these reports resulted in a truck roll by Verizon, costing the carrier millions of dollars.

In addition, these reports were used by Covad to show that Verizon failed to meet service performance standards, resulting in payments from Verizon to the competitive carrier, said Barr. Covad also used these reports to illustrate to the public and to regulators that Verizon was anti-competitive, he added.

In a statement to the press, Dhruv Khanna, Covad’s general counsel, denied the allegations. “ We consider this suit a harassment suit that thinly veils the fact that Verizon has a very poor service record and is inventing complaints to cover up its own ineptitude. … [I]t is not in our best interests to open up false ‘trouble tickets’ or service problem orders as we are required to pay ILECs for trouble tickets that prove to be our fault.”