The U.S. Federal Communications Commission was found to be badly managing consumer complaints, congressional investigators concluded on Thursday. The report concluded that in over 83 percent of the cases that came to the Commission’s attention between 2003 and 2006 no enforcement actions were taken and some cases were dismissed for no reason.

The investigation followed numerous complaints that the Federal Communications Commission has a lacunose database, and the complaint processes are slow and it takes too long for them to respond. At the same time, the investigators couldn’t find any explanation for why the commission didn’t take action is most cases.

According to the U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO), FCC responded that some of the cases were closed without enforcement action either because no violations occurred or because the data were insufficient.

“FCC assesses the impact of its enforcement program by periodically reviewing certain program outputs, such as the amount of time it takes to close an investigation, but it lacks management tools to fully measure its outcomes,” the report says.

Consequently, GAO made some proposals on how FCC could develop a more effective approach to enforcing telecommunications laws and Commission rules: improve the methods of collecting and analyzing the data, and at the same time, “develop and implement additional performance management practices, such as outcome measures, to assess the performance and improve the accountability of FCC’s enforcement program.”

The Federal Communications Commission officially responded to GAO’s report by saying that the recommendations to develop and implement performance management practices have already been implemented ever since 2006, and that during GAO’s investigation, the FCC was aware of the problems and working on fixing them.

In addition, FCC said GAO’s report relied on “information that is significantly out-of-date”, rather than use more current information, which “provides a misleading description of the Commission’s current enforcement processes.” FCC also added that the report doesn’t show the way the Commission handles consumer complaints now, different from the 2003-2006 period described in the report.