QWEST Communications has become the latest US telecommunications company to come under the microscope after a report that the Department of Justice had started an investigation of its accounting.
The struggling company said yesterday that it had "no reason to believe" that the Department had begun an inquiry into its reported figures, though it had not been able to establish that no investigation was under way.
The Department did not immediately respond to questions about a probe, but typically does not confirm such inquiries.
The report of the investigation, in the Wall Street Journal, follows a Securities and Exchange Commission inquiry initiated earlier this year.
Qwest was thrown back into the spotlight last week by the disclosure of accounting irregularities at WorldCom. Unlike WorldCom, Qwest was a big user of the controversial "swap" transactions in which telecoms companies traded large blocks of capacity on their respective networks with each other. Critics claim that some of those swaps may have been been carried out purely to boost revenues. - (Financial Times Service)
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