tripled. The amount of envelopes and postage tripled or maybe quadrupled. Fast forward to 2003 and consider again that communications cost management is not just paying the telephone bill any more. What was 11 MANAGING COST OF EQUIPMENT FACILITIES AND SERVICES a single bill changed into multiple bills because of deregulation and divestiture in 1984. Since then, technological advances and availabil- ity of commercial products and services from hundreds or thousands of potential suppliers morphed into hundreds or thousands of bills representing millions of transactions for data traffic, mobile tele- phones, pagers, two-way radios, remote site security and surveillance services, Internet web access supporting internal and external sup- plier, and customer transactions, as well as plain old telephone service. Now instead of one trusted supplier whose bill was (appro- priately or inappropriately) trusted for SO many years, we now have many suppliers requiring some level of validation and due diligence to comply with basic accounting rules, tax statutes, and fiduciary responsibility. Read this paragraph again. Not only are there common sense reasons to manage and pay communications costs wisely, there may be legal implications as well. Check out the Sarbanes-Oxley Bill of 2002 and talk to your attorney and an outside auditor. CHALLENGES AND POTENTIAL REWARDS OF COMMUNICATIONS COST MANAGEMENT The accounting question in lay terms: Are the charges valid, can they be verified, and are they treated in a manner consistent with account- ing practices across communications expenses and assets? Beyond basic compliance issues, there are immediate potential hard- dollar savings. There are also other benefits that come from good management practices. Potential savings vary depending on the size of the organization and the effectiveness of current practice. Realizing the savings requires headcount and computer resources appropriate to the size of the organization. To get a feel for potential impact you can compare your organization