Five top members of the ETC management that had direct involvement with the procurement and instalment of the system have been fired by the Corporation; and the identity of other staff members that could have been involved in the process is currently being investigated.

ETC procured the billing machine in August 2005, so as to shift to a more detailed and automated system that records every single call made by a user.
 

Once the information was transferred from the former system to the new, experts from the ETC did not test the system before putting it into operation. Although a data replicating safeguard had been purchased to work as a back up, it was never installed.
 

“The fact that ETC took the old system out of circulation, without even having a back up is a grave mistake on the part of the Corporation,” conceded Amare Amsalu, chief executive officer (CEO) of ETC during a press conference at his office on October 13, 2006. “This is an addition to the grave problem that the Corporation has been faced with.”
 

Although the new system was expected to make a record of calls made by users by registering them from switchboards; recording the length of each phone conversation and converting this recorded time into an amount to be printed on bills every month, it was realized that the system did not in fact make correct calculations.
 

Consequently, monthly bills were exaggeratedly high, which led some customers to think that the Corporation had increased the telephone tariff without announcement. Others got into disputes with collectors as they believed that ETC was charging for previously paid bills.
 

“When I was told to pay a bill worth three months of telephone services, I went to the ETC bill collectors with the three different bills that I had covered for all past three months,” said Temesgen Hailu, an ETC customer. “But I still did not get anyone to listen to me. They disconnected my phone line and charged me to get it reconnected.”
 

ETC management publicly apologized to all its customers and has gone back to the switchboards to retrieve data manually. The management hopes to reimburse all its customers for the extra charges they were forced to pay.

“We will pay back the entire amount to our customers if they so choose or we can subtract the amount from their future monthly bills,” the CEO said.

The Corporation nonetheless does not have any idea how much it will have to reimburse its customers as it has not done the necessary audit.
 

In a related story, 34,000 ETC customers who had not been receiving telephone bills for the past 11 months were asked to pay the entire accumulated amount all at once in July 2006.
 

All these malfunctions that have been occurring in the past 12 months have caused ETC to lose 14 million Br that it used to receive from roaming services.
 

“The failure has not only resulted in the loss of good will, but also in ETC losing a lot of money,” Amare added.

The staff members that ETC fired, because it believes that they had a hand in the procurement and installation of the customer care and billing system are: Abayneh Abebe, head of the Business Service Department; Asfaw HaileMariam, head of IT and Data Service Department; Abebe Belayneh, head of Corporate Planning and Business Development Department; AbdulSemed Hussein, vice-CEO, Operation head and Badeg Kebede, chief information officer.

Amare said that the investigation in to the involvement of these five dismissed staff members has been handed over to the responsible government body. The CEO did not want to state that this body was, but sources from ETC disclosed that the case was transferred to the Federal Ethics and Anti-Corruption Commission.
 

“Tests done on the system have shown us that applications it was supposed to contain had not been provided as agreed upon in the contract,” said Amare; adding that ETC was waiting for all examinations to be done, before asking the Indian company for a claim.
 

According to the contract, the machine was assembled with parts from Germany, but Amare stated that during testing, it was realized that the parts were in fact Indonesian.
 

ETC also faced further customer frustration in the past 11 months due to the failure of its 997 service, the free Customer Care line that provides billing information and customer service. Due to customers’ disappointments, ETC has now allocated 40 million Br to upgrade 997, as well as purchase a modern information system to replace it by turning the free customer care line into a full fledged call centre.

Fortune was not able to locate and speak with the dismissed former ETC staff members.

ETC intends to procure yet another customer care and billing system in two months.

“ETC needs to be reborn,” said the CEO. “A major reform will be implemented.”