Captioned phones ditched due to misuse

THE misuse of a captioned telephone service for deaf Australians saw millions in cost blowouts, a Senate estimates hearing has been told.

Communications department assistant secretary Kathleen Silleri said the CapTel handsets were distributed whether or not people needed them.

“There was no constraint on the distribution of the handset, so they were provided quite freely,” Ms Silleri told a Senates estimates hearing on Tuesday.

The committee heard the department made several failed attempts to verify who the handsets were being distributed to.

The government continued to renew the contract with the now-closed service provider, Australian Communications Exchange up until the start of this year.

ACE provided the CapTel phones under license for the National Relay Service, with workers live-captioning telephone calls.

Ms Silleri said in the last two years of ACE’s five year contract ending in 2018, there were three million call minutes on the CapTel service, up from fewer than 500,000 from 2014 to 2015.

Communications department deputy secretary Richard Windeyer said the contract cost the government $140 million, with costs increasing by an estimated $10 million each year.

“The most significant contributor to the cost blowout was the increasing call minutes for (CapTel),” Ms Silleri said.

The government has since contracted Concentrix to run the relay service, with the company unable to provide CapTel.

CapTel is licensed by the US-owned UltraTech which has ignored Concentrix’s attempts to contact them, Ms Silleri said.

Communications Minister Paul Fletcher has not received any engagement from UltraTech.

Mr Fletcher recently urged the charities watchdog to investigate ACE.

The government took legal action against ACE to compel it to provide a list of its clients so it could warn them they would be switching off CapTel on February 1.