Rumours are circulating – they have yet to be confirmed or denied by the company itself – that British Telecommunications Plc has been caught in an expensive loophole regarding reverse charge telephone calls from abroad. Users abroad have been asking the BT international operators for reverse-charge calls to Mercury Communications Ltd numbers, but the fact that these were Mercury numbers was not actually programmed onto BT’s system: therefore, if the UK caller accepted the charges, BT was routing calls to numbers it has no way of billing. BT itself was then liable for the charges levied by the foreign carrier, as well as the tariff for the UK leg of the call, with no way of recouping its losses. So the story goes, the biggest offenders have been journalists of the national press filing stories. Apparently, BT has come up with a suitably low-tech answer to the problem – a memo was circulated to all BT international operators instructing them to check numbers manually each time an international reverse charge call is requested, to see if they are Mercury or British Telecom’s.
