Brentwood school officials didn’t know a suspect had been charged, after they had cleared up and been reimbursed for almost $5,000 for iPhones improperly charged to the district.
A former sales representative of a Mehlville area cellphone retailer had secretly ordered the iPhones in the name of customers, including the Brentwood School District, then sold the phones. She was charged on Thursday.
Brentwood Superintendent of Schools David Faulkner has shared the rest of the story, not including the name of the school district employee who caught the error.
In October 2012, we cancelled our Sprint/Nextel service so that we could save money by switching from cell phones to handheld radios. This saved the district many thousands of dollars and still met our requirements for communication and safety.
When we got our last bill, our accounts payable person noticed a charge of almost $5000 for iPhones on the bill. Since cell service is paid for in advance, we were expecting a credit of about $2000. Also, since we were using Nextels, we knew that we would not have ordered iPhones, and we assumed it was merely an account mix-up.
Since we would not be able to receive our credit until the phone issue was resolved, we were very assertive in trying to reach someone at Sprint to clear up what we believed to be an error.
Actually contacting a service rep with Sprint was a daunting task, and we were transferred four times to three states. Since the delivery address was on the bill, we looked that up on the Internet to see where the delivery went. When we discovered that the address belonged to our local account representative, we started to suspect that it was more than a billing error.
We eventually reached a Sprint fraud representative, who looked at the record and found the activity after we had formally closed our account. Although we did not pay for the phones, it still took several weeks of working with Sprint to get the refund for the service credit.
In the end, however, Sprint did send us the full reimbursement for the service credit, and the district’s involvement in this situation was completed. We were unaware of what happened after that until we saw the article in the paper.