Views: 466 The Nigerian Communications Commission (NCC) has started probing data depletion in the telecoms industry in line with its mandate of consumer protection. Its Executive Vice Chairman and Chief Executive Officer, Prof Garba Dambatta ,who spoke on the sidelines of the presentation of ZIK Prize for Leadership Award to him, said reduction in the cost of data might not provide the lasting solution to the issue of data depletion, promising that the Commission would explore new measures that would address the issue. “NCC has instituted a forensic audit on the cost of data, just like we did with cost of Short Message Service (SMS) on a particular mobile operator, where we discovered that the operator unlawfully surcharged its subscribers to the tune of over N100 million and we have asked the particular operator to make refunds immediately and the operator has commenced refund to the affected subscribers. This could have gone unnoticed, if not for the quick intervention of NCC. We have plans to even extend the forensic audit on SMS to other telecoms operators.