Gov. Ralph DLG Torres signed into a law Friday a bill to prohibit phone companies from imposing an expiration date to unused prepaid phone card credits.<\/p>\n
Senate Bill No. 19-05 is now Public Law 19-50 and seeks to prohibit telecommunication companies from imposing an expiration date or forfeiture unused prepaid credits and MIFI credits earlier than 90 days.<\/p>\n
The bill, offered by Sen. Teresita A. Santos (R-Rota) in January 2015, notes that those who opt for prepaid cars may not afford to go on a postpaid contract with a phone company and \u201cshould not be forced to use all credits\u201d prior to the 30-day expiration date given on the prepaid card.<\/p>\n
The bill calls this a \u201closs to the customers and continued financial burden\u201d during \u201chard economic times.\u201d<\/p>\n
It finds that a 90-day expiration date is \u201cmore reasonable\u201d and will give customers more time to use their cards.<\/p>\n
The bill imposes penalties ranging from $5,000 and not to exceed $10,000 for persons or entity who violates the new provisions.<\/p>\n
The bill says penalties from violations will be paid into the Public Utilities Commission revolving fund.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Gov. Ralph DLG Torres signed into a law Friday a bill to prohibit phone companies…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":47,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[12098,1275,12099],"class_list":["post-230298","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-local-news","tag-mifi","tag-public-law","tag-public-utilities-commission"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/230298","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/47"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=230298"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/230298\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=230298"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=230298"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=230298"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}