Bad connection

Broadband provider CenturyLink is embroiled in a lawsuit alleging fraud, fake stock disclosures.

CenturyLink — bumbling fools running a cobbled-together company or greedy executives deliberately “cramming” onto bills services that customers don’t want and didn’t order?

Orlando lawyer Mark O’Mara, one of three lead attorneys in a nationwide lawsuit against CenturyLink, was inclined to believe the argument that the octopus of a firm with 5.9 million broadband customers just didn’t have consistent policies and its customerservice representatives weren’t well trained. The mistakes were, well, just that — mistakes.

Then, he and his colleagues pursuing a federal complaint started taking sworn statements from employees of the communications company that also has 12 million wireline subscribers.

That’s when O’Mara changed his mind.

The lawyers began hearing from former and current CenturyLink employees that the company set impossibly high goals for sales people — so high that they couldn’t meet the numbers without engaging in fraud.

Indeed, CenturyLink fired more than half its sales force between 2013 and 2017 for failing to meet crazy-high quotas, the suit states. At any given time, 70 to 80 percent of sales employees were somewhere on CenturyLink’s discipline ladder because they couldn’t sell enough.

Here’s a sample from the 165-page lawsuit, a statement from an employee identified only as FE-2:

“A lot of times I’d get unit projections and would think, ‘Are we really going to do this?’ Just looking at what we had done [historically] it was always mind blowing. In a market where we’d never sold over 1,700 units, all of a sudden we’re going to push 2,500 units next month.”