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Q: Nita Singh, are you with us?

A: Yes, I'm here.

Q: Great. Nita you are one of the 30 people we've said in the magazine, and are saying on this program, that people should watch in '03. And the reason they ought to watch you, among other things, is that you are the CEO of American Business Communication. That's a company you founded, in what, about 1990?

A: That's exactly right.

Q: And, things kind of changed, didn't they, in the telecommunications world with the 1996 Telecommunications bill?

A: Actually, so much has changed. I don't even think you could mark it with any one particular event. Certainly in today's market you can see how much change has been going on, so we have evolved quite a bit in the last 12 years.

Q: Well tell us what ABC does?

A: ABC is a telecommunications management firm. And basically we help businesses manage their telecommunications needs and costs through 4 specific ways. We help them audit and inventory all of their services, to make sure they're only being billed for the services they have, and at the right rate. We help them renegotiate their contracts. And that would be all their contracts - voice, cellular, equipment. We help them through the procurement process, which is - if they're out in the market looking for a new technology to implement, or looking for new equipment - PBX phone systems, if you will. We help them analyze their needs and then help them write RFPs and purchase that equipment or technology. Sometimes even making sure they even need the technology. And the fourth component is what we've coined as "telemanagement" where we can be doing any component of those particular things on an ongoing basis for a company where they're actually outsourcing to us on a monthly basis.

Q: Well Nita... we're speaking to Nita Singh who founded American Business Communication, one of the business leaders we've identified as being one of the thirty people to watch in '03 - You have approximately 20 years of experience in telecommunications so you've been along this area a long time. One of the interesting claims that is made by ABC, due to the services you render, is you've saved many of your clients a total in excess of 100 million dollars.

A: That's right.

Q: And I noticed that in one of the articles, and there have been a lot of articles about your success, one of the articles makes the point that over 90%, and everyone listening... before you drive off the road here, for those people listening to us on the car radio - over 90% of the bills you're called to look at contain errors.

A: Yes, it's absolutely amazing! *laugh*

Q: Before we go into that, let me ask you just one question. With regard to the 90% of errors, are they randomly distributed as errors - half of them on behalf of the customer and half of them on behalf of the company? Or do most of those errors seem to be more favoring the company rather than the customer?

A: I think in order to be able to answer that, I have to say that we see them all over the board. I don't know that I can really pool them into one bucket or the other. We tend to see billing errors that are - one could call them a customer error because the customer missed it - but it's really initiated at the billing company's end. So it's hard to really pull those apart and give them a place. What we do know is that the bills are so confusing - they're difficult to read, they're difficult to decipher... and generally it's the AP department that is paying them , they're not trained in any type of a telecom auditing process. Therefor they continue to be paid for a very long period of time. By the time someone like our company comes in and does a thorough in-depth audit, we find a lot of money.*laugh*

Q: Well I was going to say - I bet it's more frequent that you find refunds than you find situations where your customer ought to be paying the phone company more money.

A: *laugh* Ah yes. That would be uh - pretty accurate. It has happened on a couple of occasions, to be completely fair to the telecommunications providers as well, that we have found situations where customers had say X number of lines, and they were being billed for less than that. But you're right, it's definitely the exception to the rule.

Q: When you do an audit, let's assume for a moment that I'm a company... Let me ask you first, what size company would be typical of the typical-sized company you get called in to help?

A: Well generally speaking, it's medium to large companies - that's where you find multiple locations, lots of billing confusion... it's very difficult for any one telecommunications person and/or a financial analyst to manage - and that's where we get the biggest bang for our buck - and return to our customer base as well.

Q: We're speaking to Nita Singh, president and CEO of American Business Communication, a company that helps you in all aspects of telecommunication, one of the thirty business leaders to watch in '03. Let's, for my hypothetical, assume that we have 1,000 employees... I've got 9 locations - 3 in Minnesota, 6 in other parts of the country - let's make one of those in Canada, how would you do an audit? How would you get your hands around the question "My CFO or his assistant in charge of this part of procurement says 'I think we're overpaying and nobody seems to have an idea what our bills really ought to be.'" What do you do?

A: Well generally speaking, Vance, we're brought in from the top down. It is usually the CFO or someone like the CE or treasurer, someone who's going to be directly affected with the finances of that organization that brings someone like ABC in. And when we are brought in, we literally take over that component for a period of time - all the bills are funneled through us. They're copied and sent to us prior to being paid, so that any mistakes don't continue. And once we are able to gets our arms around every component of their telecom, then its thoroughly audited piece by piece. And where we find errors, we can go back - we've gone back as far as six or seven years...

Q: And are companies entitled to the audit back that far?

A: Once again I'm going to give you the typical answer, which is that it depends. It depends on how that error occurred, whose part that error was on... if a customer actually asks that certain services be disconnected, and they never were, and they continue to be billed for them and they continue to pay for them - absolutely - we got a very valid request to go back and get full credit.

Q: Without giving away your trade secrets here, once again in my hypothetical... I take it that the fact, that one of the big units is in Canada, is not a barrier to your auditing activity?

A: No it's not.

Q: Do you use software? I mean you get all the bills... they funnel through you. Do you have various kinds of software to help you look for certain kinds of patterns?

A: You know, that's an interesting point that you bring up because I do know that there is a variety of companies out there that do use particular software packages. We have really shied away from that. We developed a software package internally at one point, but what we find, Vance, is that so much of what we find, we find with human eyes, not with electronic eyes. Electronic eyes are going to skip over the same mistakes that are being skipped over right now. So literally, it's very people-intensive, every bill has been looked at by a human being - we are keying them in to certain spread sheets, if you will, that we've developed, and certain processes, but a consultant who is trained in doing this type of auditing actually touches and feels every invoice.

Q: That raises the question I wanted to get to also: How do you find these people? How do you train them? What kind of backgrounds... are there certain types of personality traits... you know, innately suspicious people, or whatever? I mean, it is so human intensive... how do you train these people?

A: You know, we have been accused of hiring conspiracy theorists. *laugh*

Q: Wow... Ah well... *laugh* I.F. Stone ought to be...

A: You know, we have been so fortunate... if there's any area that I think has really helped ABC become the company that it is, it's our employees. And I think it bodes well with the company as well as the employees, but we've really been able to attract phenomenal talent from within the industry. These are people who have come to know ABC, and understand the integrity, and what it is that we stand for, and in dealing with them, when they do decide to make a move to new organizations that they're with, we do get a lot of resumes. We don't run a lot of ads for people, in fact it's not uncommon for us to have two, three consulting candidates waiting in the wings, for us to add additional accounts.

Q: We're speaking to Nita Singh, president and CEO of American Business Communication, one of the thirty business leaders to watch in '03. How many employees do you have?

A: Right now we're at 12, and we've got an open position we're trying to fill within the next 30 days.

Q: Let's talk about some of the other functions... now, one of the things that must have changed in your world among... you're right, so much has changed in telecommunication, but nowadays I would think that you have, in addition to, POTS - Plain Old Telephone Service, of course some sort of internet connection - your T1 or ISDN lines or DSL or whatever, you've got perhaps dedicated lines, you may have a virtual network involvement, wireless networks.. many of those are billed by the same company or are billed with several companies operating together to give that kind of service. That must make it a great deal more complicated. Can you tell us if any one type of those services is more error-prone than others or is it randomly distributed?

A: Well, I can tell you that if you have a service that you're paying a flat-fee for, that doesn't have a lot of other billing components to it, for instance, like internet access, you're probably not going to see a whole lot of mistakes there. You're going to catch them pretty readily. You know if you're paying X for internet access every month, if X isn't what you're being billed, that you've got a problem.

Where we start to find a lot of mistakes and errors, is where you've got multiple services billing on one invoice, where it has multiple components- for instance, if you're talking about plain old telephone service - well let's talk about plain old long distance. How difficult could that be? You'd be surprised at how many problems we find with just plain old long distance. And that's where the billing increment isn't what it's supposed to be. That's where the rate, because it's fractionalized - is not rounding up correctly to where it should be. We get a different rate for intra-state versus inter-state, say from somewhere else. And any one of those components could be wrong, so on the surface it could look as though the bill is correct. And that's where you really find a lot of those problems. You also find them when you see a lot of different charges appearing on your bill - you see a lot of new taxes showing up... *laugh* ... federal fees. Once you start adding up all of those components of the multiple-component bills, they're just riddled with problems.

Q: I would think too, that ... did you ever have the problem of phone calls initiated in state A go to state B, and state A doesn't have the same tax as state B? Did you ever have a situation where one taxing authority tries to inappropriately tax incoming or outgoing calls that didn't come within that tax jurisdiction?

A: Funny you should bring that up, we did have an instance, in fact it was a fairly serious incident, where actually there was an attorney involved who really wanted to take a class action...

Q: You're kidding!

A: No, I'm not kidding. *laugh* And so we did do a lot of background supportive work for that particular law firm because we were able to uncover, through an audit, that a particular organization was absolutely misbilling for the way they were billing their taxes. And there's absolutely no way that any typical organization, no matter how large or how small, could really uncover that, unless you knew the tax laws.

Q: We've been speaking... Nita thanks for being with us... to Nita Singh who is the president and CEO of American Business Communication - a fascinating company, successful... a company that will help you save money, when it comes to your various telecommunication needs, and one of the thirty business leaders to watch in '03.