A North Vancouver law firm specializing in class action lawsuits has filed court documents against four cellphone companies over "system access fees."
Poyner Baxter filed the proposed class action lawsuit in B.C. Supreme Court Dec. 16 against Rogers Communications Inc., Bell Canada Enterprises Inc., Telus Corporation, Fido Solutions Inc. and their subsidiaries on behalf of all cellphone customers in B.C.
If the claim is successful, it could be worth up to $1 billion, said lawyer Jim Poyner. The law firm first looked into the system access fees when they were pointed out by one of the company's North Vancouver consultants.
The claim alleges phone companies have regularly charged their customers what was described as a "systems access fee" "systems administrative fee or "license administrative fee" on monthly bills, usually an amount of about $7.
Decades ago, in the early days of cellphone use, there was such a fee charged by the federal government that the phone companies simply passed on, said Poyner.
But while the government stopped charging that fee many years ago, the phone companies continued to bill their customers, said Poyner.
According to the lawsuit, by separating that amount out, the cellphone companies misrepresented it as a tax or fee paid to government or a third party.
Instead, the fee was just another charge collected by the cellphone companies for their own use, the lawsuit claims.
The lawsuit asks the companies to stop charging the system access fees as separate amounts and to pay back customers the amounts already charged to them.
It's not known how much money could be at stake if the case is successful, but Poyner estimates it could be up to $1 billion, considering an estimated two million cellphone users in B.C. could potentially claim the fees back six years.
Poyner added a very similar class-action case involving cellphone access fees has already been certified in Saskatchewan courts.
A spokesman for Telus declined to comment on the case while another spokeswoman for Rogers and Fido said the company hasn't received the documents yet.
The case has some similarities to another class-action suit launched by the North Vancouver law firm against several airlines. In those cases, the law firm is taking issue with amounts represented as "taxes" on airline tickets - often amounting to several hundred dollars per ticket - that it says are not taxes paid to government or third parties, but are simply additional fees collected by the airlines for their own use.
