Decius wrote:
] ] Justice Department officials have evidence that MCI may,
] ] in effect, have "laundered" calls through small
] ] telephone companies, and even redirected domestic calls
] ] through Canada, to avoid paying access fees or shift them
] ] to rival long-distance carriers, according to people
] ] involved in the investigation.
] ]
] ] The lawyers told the investigators that the
] ] tests also showed that the billing codes that are
] ] transmitted with telephone calls in data packets had been
] ] doctored.

Frankly I think MCI should be rewarded for some of this behavior. I agree that to purposefully reroute calls to avoid tariffs is wrong. There are absolutely no checks or controls to police this though, so I'm also sure that every other carrier does the same thing.

But if you're carrying traffic on your network and need to dump it to someone else (who gets paid to terminate it for you), then I don't see any reason why you shouldn't reroute so that you can avoid reciprocal compensation. In fact, we actually had a pilot of this using VOIP at BlueStar. We could terminate calls for other carriers to our customers, but when our customer's wanted to place a call that would be terminated by another carrier, we were rerouting them via PRI (which would not require reciprocal comp). This just seems like good competitive practice to me. There is no tax revenue on reciprocal comp (unless you count income tax).

RE: MCI Faces Federal Fraud Inquiry on Fees for Long-Distance Calls