What is Dial Around Compensation?

The dial around compensation system is unique to the United States, a mechanism for owners of payphones to receive compensation for toll free telephone calls completed from their payphones. Ever since the FCC established the per call compensation system back in 1996, payphone service providers have endured widespread abuse of the system by long distance carriers of all sizes.

The types of abuse range from carriers deliberately misapplying the FCC's regulatory requirements associated with the system, to carriers simply deliberately failing to pay their required per call compensation payments to PSPs.

Typical regulatory semantics played by the long distance carriers include obligations related to FLEX ANI implementation and practice, semantics about what the FCC's true meaning of a "completed" call is for purposes of compensation eligibility, semantics about which carrier in the call path has a duty to track the payphone calls for determination of liability, and semantics about which carrier in the call path has a duty to pay the per-call compensation amount to the PSP.

This is where PSP Legal Services comes in. PSPs who have no hope of recovering their full compensation from these recalcitrant carriers legally assign their claims to PSP Legal Services so that we can pursue legal remedies to recover the losses. PSP Legal Services was established in 2009, and we are in a unique position to be able to pursue these legal dial around compensation collections for two reasons.

First, there is a relatively recent spree of legal precedent providing the tools needed for us to be effective. In other words, the law is on our side.

Second, our effectiveness is bolstered by the fact that our principals have participated in the payphone industry throughout the existence of this per call compensation system, so we have a specialized understanding of the complex underlying issues that give rise to payphone compensation disputes in the marketplace.