NEW DELHI, June 17: Indian Airlines takes several routes to losses. The latest is via errors in billing and accounting.Take this. It billed Jet Airways in rupees instead of dollars for carrying Jet's inter-airline travellers. For the Delhi-Ahmedabad sector, for example, Jet was billed Rs 120 per passenger instead of $ 120. The mistake was repeated several times in February.The errors in bills are so frequent that Indian Airlines' finance department has written to its information technology (IT) department saying that the airline was suffering huge losses due to incorrect data entries.The letter - written on February 26 - to the Director (IT) says: "While scrutinising the mail bills of October 1997, the total of short-punched weight comes to over 51,000 kg. This will result in loss of approximately Rs 16 lakh."The letter also says that, given the large volumes of such mail, some way has to be found to ensure the accuracy of mail-billing in the future. However, sources say that the bloomers haveonly multiplied in the subsequent months.Even the fortnightly statements provided by the airline's authorised agents are entered incorrectly, say sources. The result: many agents are defaulting on payments.Such errors are not confined to domestic players. Discrepancies have also been discovered in bills sent by Indian Airlines to the International Air Transport Association (IATA) which acts as the clearing house for all airlines. Officials say that several bills sent to IATA are sent back because of mistakes, and payments are held up till they are sorted out. Of course, in cases of under-billing, not too many airlines complain - so such cases are overlooked.In an invoice sent to IATA, Delta Airlines was billed $ 500 per ticket for taxes for the Calcutta-Bangkok sector, instead of Rs 500. Incidentally, the total fare for the sector is just $ 144. The fact that Indian Airlines' total billing with IATA is in the region of around $ 10 million dollars a month points to the magnitude of the "data entry"problem.A letter sent by M C Gupta, the airline's manager, finance (revenue) on May 15 to A K Rastogi, the director in charge of IT, cites several other examples. "In January 1998, the commission chart does not correctly show the equivalent INR (Indian rupee) amounts when compared to the respective US dollar billing amounts. This appears to be a programming error due to application of wrong conversion rates. No foreign travel tax (FTT) was billed in January 1998 and almost 4,000 coupons amounting to $ 9,000 approx were short-billed," the letter says. With the computer division letting them down, these amounts were later billed manually.The same letter adds: "Similarly, in February 1998, foreign travel tax was billed on US dollar basis irrespective of the currency mentioned in the tickets. For example, amounts of INR 500 were punched as USD 500 or Taka 300 was punched as USD 300 etc."Other classic goof-ups include billing the J-class fare for the Calcutta-Dhaka sector as $850 instead of $85.Incorrect conversions led to short-billing of $ 100 per coupon on the Sharjah/Bombay and Sharjah/Calicut sectors. Gupta's letter says that while the airline's bilateral arrangement with Royal Nepal Airlines allows billing in local Indian rupees, this concept has been applied to all airlines instead of charging dollar fares.Rastogi told The Indian Express that there were only two data entry operators in the department and, as a result, they had to sub-contract the work to outsiders. "We are trying to work on a system of data imaging which wouldn't require manual data entry and would reduce the chances of any such mistakes," Rastogi concludes.
