One of Iowa’s largest telephone service providers is in much deeper financial trouble than first thought. Officials with Qwest Communications says company revenues were overstated both in 2000 and 2001 by as much as one-and-a-half billion dollars. The Denver-based Qwest has to clear up any accounting questions before government regulators can approve the company’s bid to enter the long-distance phone business. Qwest hopes to do that in Iowa and 13 other states. Some 25-hundred Iowans work for Qwest. The company’s in the process of eliminating two thousand jobs nationwide this year, after cutting four thousand jobs last year.
