T-Mobile Finds Data Discrepancies in Calif. Foster Youth Pilot

Data reported on California’s foster youth pilot program from February through July “is likely to contain inaccuracies that require further review and analysis, and caution should be exercised in reaching any conclusions based on this preliminary data,” T-Mobile and iFoster said Tuesday. The California Public Utilities Commission last week sought comments by Sept. 26 on a staff proposal to make the California LifeLine foster youth pilot program permanent (see 2309050080). But in a Tuesday letter to the CPUC, the companies running the pilot said “iFoster identified numerous discrepancies in the phone numbers for the foster youth on the service provider bills beginning with the February bill.” T-Mobile and iFoster said they have been working for months to investigate and correct the problems. “The account portal that T-Mobile provided for iFoster’s use in March encountered a system error which caused the portal to omit broadband usage for a significant number of lines for the months of March and May 2023,” they said. “T-Mobile corrected that issue and it appears that the integrity of the data for other iFoster reporting months was not affected.” Another “error involved the misalignment between phone numbers used as placeholders on T-Mobile phones pending disbursal, and the permanent phone numbers that were later associated with those same phones,” said iFoster and T-Mobile: That “caused an understatement of text, voice, and data usage for many of the youth lines, affecting the accuracy of some of the data reported by iFoster beginning in February 2023.” T-Mobile expects to correct data and to implement a “new ordering and kitting process in place within the next few weeks,” they said.