PI-001 ยท Telecommunications
Subscriber lifecycle and commission integrity
The fish that keeps swimming after the school has turned.
Presenting problem
We reconcile subscriber activity, commission schedules, payments, pending transactions, and chargebacks to identify compensation that was earned but never properly paid.
What brought us in
Commission expense grew faster than the active subscriber base for four consecutive quarters. Finance could not explain the divergence and operations could not reproduce it.
What the client believed
That the growth was a timing effect: commissions were assumed to trail activations by a variable number of days, so a lag was expected to close on its own.
What the evidence showed
The divergence was not a lag. A subset of subscriber records ended in the provisioning system without a corresponding termination event reaching the compensation system. Both systems remained internally consistent. The contradiction existed only when the two were placed side by side over the same period.
How the examination proceeded
Method applied to this engagement.
- 01Took custody of provisioning, billing, compensation, dealer master and clawback records for a thirty month window, preserving each original exactly as received.
- 02Reconstructed the lifecycle of every subscriber relationship as a single sequence of events rather than as separate system states.
- 03Isolated relationships where the compensation sequence continued past the last supported operational event.
- 04Tested alternative explanations for each candidate, including reactivations, transfers, plan migrations and delayed reporting, and discarded those the records supported.
- 05Quantified only the population that survived every alternative explanation, with a duplicate exposure check applied across dealers.
Substantiated findings
What the records support.
Compensation was paid on subscriber relationships that had terminated, in a population that no reactivation, transfer or reporting delay accounts for.
Substantiated - documentaryClawback provisions in the dealer agreements were enforceable but were not triggered, because the trigger depended on an event that never crossed system boundaries.
Substantiated - contractualA concentrated subset of dealers accounted for a disproportionate share of the affected population, sustained across the full period rather than clustered around any single month.
Substantiated - patternExposure
$20k+ commissions analyzed, $15k+ outstanding
Figures are rounded and generalized for publication. In delivery, each figure is deterministic and carries its inputs, calculation version and population definition.
Control failure map
Why it was possible.
- No owner was accountable for agreement between provisioning and compensation.
- Termination events were treated as an operational fact, not as a financial control input.
- Dealer performance review used volume, not retained volume.
- Reconciliation compared totals, which agreed, rather than lifecycles, which did not.
Outcome
What the client did with it.
- Findings and exposure delivered as an executive brief with a supporting evidence package.
- Recovery pursued under existing contract terms without renegotiation.
- A termination event was promoted to a controlled financial input with named ownership.
Every figure in the delivered report traces to a finding, a calculation version, the source records used, and the preserved original evidence with its hash recorded on receipt.
