By Ian Bush

PHILADELPHIA (CBS) — Comcast has issued a public apology to the Northern California man who says the cable giant got him fired from his accounting job after a bill dispute.

The exec in charge of shoring up customer service at Comcast says what happened with Conal O’Rourke’s service “is completely unacceptable” — that Comcast “simply dropped the ball and didn’t make things right.”

But Charlie Herrin says no one at the company asked for O’Rourke to be given the boot from PricewaterhouseCoopers, which does consulting for Comcast.

O’Rourke claims he was overcharged — dozens of pieces of cable and Internet equipment that he didn’t order landed on his bill, to the tune of more than $1,800.

After getting no answers from reps in customer service, he called Comcast’s controller’s office to complain. Later that month, O’Rourke lost his job at PwC for an ethics violation, according to the company.

In a letter to O’Rourke’s lawyer, an attorney for Comcast says while they told PwC that one of their workers — who volunteered his employment information — “yelled at [Comcast] employees who tried to assist him,” no one asked PwC to fire O’Rourke.

In a statement posted to Comcast’s website, Herrin says “We’re also determined to get to the bottom of exactly what happened with his service, figure out what went wrong at every point along the way, and fix any underlying issues… We’re holding ourselves accountable and we are working hard to make real improvements across the board. While it will take us some time, we can and will do better than this.”

Comcast is under intense scrutiny as it vies for regulatory approval of its bid for Time Warner Cable.

You may also be interested in:

[display-posts category=”news” wrapper=”ul” posts_per_page=”5″]