Two Georgia counties are suing 15 phone companies, alleging the companies deliberately underbilled $50 million through emergency 911 fees.

Bills for phone, wireless, and other services typically come with a variety of surcharges, fees, and taxes, but some companies may be using these surcharges to hide fees that they themselves are pocketing.

For instance, emergency 911 fees are supposed to be used to pay for emergency services.

However, recent reports suggest that phone companies may be taking a considerable portion of these emergency 911 fees, cheating local governments from their emergency service funding in favor of company profit.

In other cases, phone companies may deliberately failing to collect the emergency 911 fees required by local government.

The lawsuits were filed by Cobb and Gwinnett Counties in the state of Georgia.

The counties allege in the lawsuit that phone companies including Verizon Enterprise Solutions, BellSouth Telecommunications, Earthlink, and others failed to collect $50 million in emergency 911 fees and turn those fees over to the counties for emergency call services.

According to the lawsuit, these phone companies actively misrepresented how much they would collect in emergency 911 fees, charging only single fees on lines with multiple phone numbers and failing to include accounts using voice-over-internet services.

“The telephone service providers have a statutory and fiduciary responsibility under Georgia law to properly bill, collect and remit 911 fees,” said former Georgia Gov. Roy Barnes, one of the lawyers working as the counties’ representation. “These monies need to be paid for the benefit of the counties’ 911 systems.”

Filing a Lawsuit Over Emergency 911 Fees

While phone companies are generally required to collect emergency 911 fees from their customers, they are expected to turn that money over to local governments to support emergency services.

While phone customers are paying no more in emergency 911 fees to companies who are pocketing some of this money, this deceit is ultimately harmful on an even larger scale, as emergency services will suffer.

If you are an employee of a phone company that may be keeping the emergency 911 fees of its customers for itself, you may be able come forward as a whistleblower.

Whistleblowers are employees and former employees of a company with insider information about fraudulent behavior from within the company, either against the government or consumers. Filing a whistleblower lawsuit could call attention to missing emergency 911 fees as well as result in a substantial monetary award.

Because of the important role of a whistleblower in exposing fraud and deceit by a company, the whistleblower is usually awarded a substantial chunk of any whistleblower lawsuit settlement money. This is often between 15 and 30 percent.