Siobhan Hughes

July 11, 2006

WASHINGTON (Dow Jones)--AT&T Inc. (T), the giant telephone company, has agreed to pay $550,000 to resolve two separate regulatory matters, the Federal Communications Commission said on Monday.

The agreement resolves an issue that was publicized earlier this year, when the FCC had proposed fining AT&T $100,000 for failing to prepare and maintain an annual certification of procedures for protecting the privacy of consumer records.

"AT&T has since executed and provided a certificate to the FCC," said Michael Balmoris, an AT&T spokesman, in a statement.

Separately, the agreement concludes an investigation that the FCC said had started in July 2005, when regulators asked AT&T's predecessor entity, SBC Communications, for information about its "opt-out" procedures after the company reported failures in its system.

"AT&T discovered through its internal procedures that notices that we normally send to new customers allowing them to opt out of certain future marketing initiatives of the company were not sent to them," Michael Balmoris, an AT&T spokesman, said in a statement. He said that "we reported the incident to the FCC and took steps to ensure that the errors do not happen again."

-By Siobhan Hughes, Dow Jones Newswires; 202-862-6654; Siobhan.Hughes@dowjones.com