The Audit Process at Verizon

TRI: When does your RA team start its audits? Is it before the bills are run or after?

Romano: My team is all over the billing process -- before, during, and after.

You know, billing is like payroll. When you do it right, nobody notices. When you do it wrong, everybody notices.

For me, billing is at the end of a cycle. As I tell my team: if you don't understand everything before the data got to you, you can't understand billing.

To give you an idea of the scope of our RA operations, we manage over 300 control points for our FiOS fiber optic product line in the high-speed data and video areas.

RA starts looking at things from the time an order is placed. We pull data out of ordering, provisioning, billing, journals, settlements -- you name it.

Daily we run automated processes that identify if we have something that is not consistent with business rules. Our team of analysts then look at those problems to catch things early on.

After a new product is released, I also have people on my team who define the end-to-end test cases, then certify whether the release is ready to roll.

We have the authority to stop or delay a release, though we rarely use that power.

As soon as orders come in, I have people sampling those orders to check on errors. Then, if we need to drill deeper, because we're backed up by Subex's Moneta, we can access 100% of the orders of a particular type.

We also have people doing bill cycle balancing. Every billing cycle we scrutinize the bills. For instance, we do a comparison with a customer's prior month to make sure any differences are explainable.