Telstra to pay $24m for wrong billing

Telstra will refund wrongfully billed customers a total of $21 million by the end of year and a $3 million penalty for breaching the relevant consumer code.

The Australian Communications and Media Authority launched an investigation into the country’s biggest telecommunications provider to find thousands of customers were wrongly billed between April 2012 and August 2023.

ACMA found 6,532 customers were charged for inactive internet services by an average of $2,600 by Telstra, with the majority being small businesses.

The authority found Telstra’s conduct was a breach of customer billing accuracy rules under the Telecommunications Consumer Protections code.

Telstra has paid a $3,010,320 penalty and refunded more than $17.7 million, with a further $3.4 to be paid to customers by the end of the year.

ACMA chair Nerida O’Loughlin said the authority had lost patience with Telstra after this series of significant billing errors.

“Telstra has a history of incorrectly billing customers and it’s just not good enough,” she 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.

“Telstra is a major player in the Australian telco sector and it needs to continue to prioritise its billing compliance and get its systems in order.”

According to ACMA, Telstra cited a failure to follow a series of steps in its ADSL internet service deactivation process as the cause of the billing issues.

ACMA directed Telstra to comply with billing accuracy rules in September 2020, after the telecom company overcharged more than 10,000 customers almost $2.5 million in a 12-year period.

The investigation was followed by another one conducted in 2022 that found Telstra overcharged more than 11,000 customers around $1.7 million, ACMA said.

The multi-million-dollar refund comes a week after ACMA fined Telstra more than $300,000 for repeated safety and privacy failures over customers’ emergency information details.