What would you expect to happen where you work re excessive mobile phone bill?

[UltimateWednesday]

Staff working from home have obviously relied heavily on their mobile phones and we expected an increase in the bills.

However, one member of staff's internet usage has run up a bill of almost 5 figures! This is clearly not work related.

We'll deal with it through the appropriate code of conduct and discipline policies but would staff where you work be expected to repay the money?

We seem to be in the odd position where if it was a few hundred pounds we would but this huge amount seems an unreasonable (impossible?) demand.

Why don’t the phones have caps? I’m quite surprised you don’t have that in place. In my old job, phones would flag up when you were close to limits. Totally irresponsible not to have done that.

We had similar and I’m going back to 2003 or so, so the figures were immense. She’d had a breakdown so management had sent her back to her home country to just chill out with her mum a bit. Nobody stopped to think she’d be phoning her bf 6 hours a day on the company phone.

Long story short, 6k in 3 weeks on calls alone. We sucked it up, she was far too vital to operations to lose.

If it's a work phone the company should have put a cap (maximum spend limit) on it.
Something to do tomorrow with all work phones urgently I think and consider it a lesson learnt!

@SeasonFinale

Is it my husband? Yesterday he took/made 63 work related calls and some of them were transatlantic.

You mention that it ia senior member of staff. what work are they being expected to do from home that would usually go on to landlines at work and internet based services covered at work?

As it is a work phone you would know what rate they are on and whether they have international discounts etc.

Calls you could maybe understand but this is data so I'm really interested to find out how this is even possible

Did the employee have any way of knowing they were incurring such a high bill? If not, then I think it would be grossly unfair to try and present them with a ten grand bill out of the blue.

Why does your company even allow such a high bill to be run up? Why do you not have the phone provider set a cap?

Why aren't they using Teams/Zoom/Skype? And why aren't they using broadband?

Your company phone plan is rubbish clearly.

@UltimateWednesday

If it makes a difference, it's a very senior well paid member of staff. £10k is not (quite) as much as it sounds.

£10k an absurd amount of money. Their seniority and position in the company doesn't change how absurd it is.

Mind you.... about 4 years ago I left my 3/4G on- on my phone for the weekend (accidentally) when I went away. I never normally leave it on. I turn it on/off as I need it and always (trusted) WiFi.

I didn’t use the 3G to download anything. Most I’d have done is browse.

When my next bill came it was hundreds about £200. I couldn’t believe it. I couldn’t understand it. I paid the bill as it must have been roaming or something and NEVER keep my 3G on to this day!!

@Feelinghistoric

Why don’t the phones have caps? I’m quite surprised you don’t have that in place. In my old job, phones would flag up when you were close to limits. Totally irresponsible not to have done that.

This! First thing I thought-how has this been allowed to happen?!

@Babesinthewud

Mind you.... about 4 years ago I left my 3/4G on- on my phone for the weekend (accidentally) when I went away. I never normally leave it on. I turn it on/off as I need it and always (trusted) WiFi.

I didn’t use the 3G to download anything. Most I’d have done is browse.

When my next bill came it was hundreds about £200. I couldn’t believe it. I couldn’t understand it. I paid the bill as it must have been roaming or something and NEVER keep my 3G on to this day!!

I don't know about every phone but I've not had a phone that didn't have a data usage warning setting for years, you should set that to save having to worry about going over your contract. Also every contract I've had has allowed me to set a cap on the bill, no one should be getting unexpected bills nowadays

For context, I was worried about my own usage, I've used internet a lot myself for work and for FB/MN/shopping. My usage amounted to £20.

Do you have a policy for this? My workplace does. We also have caps on our phones and have to apply if we want them lifted. We then have to report our usage every 2 weeks if we've exceeded the amount it was capped to.

We had something similar a few months ago... they racked up a bill of a few thousand watching Netflix!!! They were sacked for gross misconduct.

Were they watching at work/in work time learner? Our policy has that as gross misconduct but this, outside of work time (or probably by a family member) as misconduct.

My son has just pointed out you can get in app purchases charged to a phone account and you can run up hundreds of pounds as a day very quickly. If children have somehow got into the account and used it for Fortnite.

Ah, yes, I'm sure it will be something to do with her handful son. I actually feel quite sorry for her, she'll be mortified.

This happened at my place of work, a member of staff racked up a huge phone bill on a trip to the US because he didn’t realise he was watching youtube etc. with data on. It was his error and not what his work phone was intended for. He was made to pay back the amount.

Make sure you get the details from the phone company, I had a crazy bill once and when questioned it turned out to be a massive error on their part so it is worth checking. Not sure if you can expect them to pay if it is them though, I suppose you need to see what ot has been used for and judge partly based on that. A lot of company phones are deliberately limited so perhaps think about disabling things like Netflix etc that aren't required for work purposes

Separate to the issue, but I’d suggest switching her to an unlimited data tariff! Our business Vodafone charge is £30 a month for unlimited data worldwide

Well it’s right to have the question with her.
However, as an employee I’d expect the company to set up sufficient contract with the phone company which doesn’t allow this (my personal phone is capped at £5 extra charges a month). You should discuss with the phone operator setting notifications and caps for high usage as this is clearly inadvertent usage.

We have almost 100 phones on the account. Most people barely use data at all, just for email and the allowance can be shared so it really shouldn't be an issue, but yes, we do need to review things.

If you know that she'll be mortified, then you know that she had no idea that this was

If a company specifies reasonable data usage, they need to put things in place eg phone caps to facilitate that.

Agree with checking with phone company to see if they have made a mistake, then reviewing your whole phone policy ie provider, rate, alerts, frequency of bills,

I think the organisation needs to suck it up tbh. It's not an employees fault that they have a rubish internet contract and that no-one monitored usage for 3 months.

are/were they working from abroad, outside eu where roaming isn't capped?

You need to find out what it is. If it’s in-game / app then you may well be able to get it refunded.