suspended on full pay

natureboss

DUTR wrote: »

Hindsight is a wonderful thing, if you are 'expected' to provide your own data connection, then why was a dongle with sim only 30 day or payg not possible?
If I work from home I use my PAYG for the outgoing calls, (desk phone diverted to the handset) , I used 42p from my payg, which is cheaper than the petrol cost to and from work.

Anyways I guess if you were no briefed the policy, then you may end up on a final warning.
Good luck with the outcome though.

I completely agree, If I would have known about the tariff I would have bought a dongle or used a wifi connection from starbucks etc.

somethingcorporate

Who is the mobile company?

I know one who operates a "bill shock" process when (business) customers get massive data charges (way higher than yours) and will write 85-90% of it off if it was a genuine mistake and they take data capped services going forward.

Absolutely nothing to lose by disputing it with the mobile company.

tea_lover

Another vote for checking with the mobile company. Three of my OH's colleagues recently got huge (£8k+ each) data bills. They were all incorrect.

pimento

Who decided to give you a smartphone? Who negotiates the mobile contract? If they didn't tell you there was no data plan then they are remiss.

In our place, it's IT who handle the mobile phones.

getmore4less

natureboss wrote: »

Hi!

My company has currently suspended me on full pay because of a high company mobile phone bill that arrived.

The bill is formed by data transactions I was upgraded to a company smartphone 5 months ago but still had an old sim with no data plan.

Looking at the companies mobile phone bill I have found out that my bill went up by 8 times during 4/5 months without me really using the smartphone (i imagine that was app refreshes or system updates).

Recently, I moved home and was without broadband for 2 weeks. Because I work from home, I used my mobile phone connection to work, hence the reason of the huge bill.

Before the suspension, we had a disciplinary meeting and these are the main points:

- the smartphone was never authorised by my line manager, i had an old handset that was defective and I requested a phone swap.

- another colleague had the same problem but was assigned with an old handset

- the company has never provided a schedule of costs of the company mobile phone bill or advised on what plan I was put on.

- I disputed the fact that nobody made me aware of the data costs or checked my mobile phone bill until it got to a 4 zeros figure 5 months after.

Do you think there are grounds for a company dismissal ?

Cheers

The main issues.

Who authorised the phone?

Is there a policy for training/setting up smart phones?
(although it is common knowledge you have to be careful with background tasks and data usage it is something that should be in the phone use policy)

Now if there is a policy what is in it do you have the policy as a phone user ot should you have been "trained"

Who authorised the use of data to substitute the missing broadband?

IMO This is the key,

not checking you had an appropriate day plan is gross stupidity, incompetence and quite possibly misconduct.

Also by knowing about the use of the phone to replace BB you have identified you have knowledge of smart phones and can't plead ignorance.

If your previous phone sim was calls and text it would be obvious you needed to check the data plan.


The thing here is you have set yourself up to be got rid off unless they really want to keep you.


Even if the phone company sorts it out and charges as if there had been a plan in place I think this still warrants a action.

keyser666

We had the same situation in my company a couple of years ago. What happened was we had some contractors issued with blackberry devices, some of our contractors were from Oz and new zealand as it was a massive UK construction project. They took the sims out of their phones and put it in their dongles to surf the net and watch TV programmes oinline from home.

The issue was they blackberry devices were on a blackberry contract which allowed for 1000's of emails but other data like tethering was charged at £2 per mb. If you think a one hour TV programme comes in around 360mb and they watched heaps over a month their biills came in at 20k plus. I was tasked with going through the bill but we did not have a mobile device policy in place so they got a ticking off from HR.

So first question is is there a Mobile device policy, does it cover tethering?

It is immaterial as to you being told what tarriff you were on so no point in bringing that up.

Why didnt you ask IT for a dongle?

I am intrigued as to how the bill was 10k plus just for work orientated stuff, what did this involve? Did you connect to the work network? If so how?