FairPoint Communications today is filing a letter with the Vermont Public Service Board (Board) denying allegations made in an anonymous e-mail sent to the Board.
"Despite the inherent difficulty in responding to anonymous allegations, FairPoint takes these allegations very seriously, and engaged outside attorneys to conduct an investigation," said David Hauser, CEO of FairPoint. "The outside attorneys have found no evidence to support the allegations of a fraudulent or fabricated testing process or that FairPoint misled Liberty about the testing results."
The e-mail purportedly relates to the testing and presentations conducted by FairPoint for the Liberty Consulting Group regarding the status of the cutover systems. The outside attorneys hired by FairPoint have interviewed all of the parties named in the e-mail plus others and have discovered no evidence to support the allegations made in the e-mail.
The e-mail complains that during live system presentations to Liberty, FairPoint used a series of screen shots, the computer equivalent to still photographs, to mislead Liberty's representatives into believing that they were watching a real demonstration of system capabilities.
In its filing, FairPoint notes that screenshots were used appropriately for various purposes, including during live testing to replicate or simulate connections to live databases outside the FairPoint testing environment. This was necessary, because FairPoint was not allowed, except for very controlled testing with Verizon, to test against live networks. FairPoint states further that the attorneys investigating the e-mail allegations did not find any uses by FairPoint of screenshots to obscure or misrepresent test results to Liberty. Rather, the use of screenshots to simulate system activity was disclosed and explained to Liberty and the Board.
FairPoint's response highlights public records before the Board contradicting the allegations and conclusions made in the e-mail and explaining in detail the testing procedures employed by FairPoint and its technology partner CapGemini and the oversight of Liberty.
During the time period generally referred to by the anonymous complainant, the testing process was well documented by the sworn testimony of Liberty and FairPoint and was under extensive scrutiny by Liberty and the Board as well as the Maine and New Hampshire Public Utility Commissions.