RICHMOND, VA. ? For weeks, Rusty McGowan wondered why the phone for his waterscaping company had stopped ringing. Did he offend someone? Had his fish ponds and waterfalls failed to please?

Then he thumbed through the new phonebook. Verizon Communications Inc., he realized, had published the wrong number for the business, Aqua-Scapes of Virginia/Virginia Waterscaping, in three Yellow Pages in the state. In the white pages, his company’s listing was dropped altogether.

“They have ruined me,” said McGowan, who says his Yellow Pages ads generate about half his sales. Verizon didn’t charge him and offered him a free ad in one book, he said, but the damage was done. He estimates the omissions cost his Virginia Beach business about $35,000.

The nation’s largest local phone company, based in New York, has made a series of embarrassing errors in its directories in recent years. In a well publicized gaffe last year, as many as 12,000 Verizon telephone numbers that Virginia, West Virginia, Maryland and Washington, D.C., customers had paid to keep unlisted were accidentally published. In 2003, Verizon was forced to publish supplements to more than a dozen error-riddled directories in New York.

Online directory

Verizon does not publish printed phone books in Kansas, but its online directory — www.Superpages .com — does include Kansas listings, spokesman Lisa Balusek said. Online mistakes can be corrected in 24 to 48 hours.

In Virginia, Verizon has bungled multiple phonebooks across the state several times. In the past year, about 700 businesses, residents and governments have complained to state regulators about wrong numbers, misnamed companies and omitted listings.

Customers who tried to fix the problems say they had to wade through Verizon’s bureaucracy, waiting on hold or unable to reach the right person. Some mistakes were compounded instead of corrected, and some corrections weren’t made at all.

In January, the State Corporation Commission said it would investigate the company’s white page directories, which fall under its regulations because they are part of basic phone service.

Landscaping business owner Rusty McGowan said he wondered why his phone had stopped ringing at his new waterscaping business in Virginia. He later learned that Verizon had listed his business with an incorrect number.

“Something is falling down in the process,” said Kenneth Schrad, a spokesman for the agency.

Verizon representatives said they were working closely with state regulators. But they provided little detail about the mistakes and declined several times to discuss specific complaints.

“We have had directory errors, and we apologize for the inconvenience this causes our customers,” said Mary De La Garza, a spokeswoman for Verizon Information Services, which publishes 1,200 directories and tens of millions of listings. “When we identify a directory error, we work diligently to figure out what happened, get it corrected and prevent it from happening again.”

State regulators and some telecom analysts were puzzled by Verizon’s directory mistakes, characterizing them as unusual for the company and the industry. They say service providers have grappled in the past with phonebook errors, but they were not aware of anything to the magnitude of the problems in Virginia.

Jay Pultz, an analyst at the research company Gartner Inc., said the problems weren’t surprising considering the industry’s cost-cutting and automation.

“They might have gone too far in removing checks and balances,” he said of Verizon.

Consumer advocates call Verizon’s errors an illustration of how customer service has suffered while the phone company expanded to dominate the Northeast and Mid-Atlantic states.

“I don’t sense any desire from the folks I’ve worked with to really make things better for consumers. They’re working real hard to take care of their bottom line,” said Irene Leech, president of the Virginia Citizens Consumer Council.

Verizon hopes to expand further through an acquisition of MCI Inc. It’s in a bidding war with Qwest Communications International Inc. for the long distance provider.

Customers say the directory mistakes have made life difficult for them.

Virginia Health Services Inc., which owns rehabilitation, retirement and convalescent homes in southeast Virginia, said area phone directories omitted one facility, ran an old ad for another and listed an unpublished private line as the company’s main telephone number.

“These mistakes will significantly impact our operations,” an executive wrote to state regulators.

In the Richmond white pages, Verizon listed the number for St. Mary’s Catholic Church’s school instead of the one for the church. As a result, school personnel were inundated with phone calls — including those of “a critical and confidential nature,” the church wrote in an e-mail.

Providence Hundred Enterprises Inc. told state regulators it was forced to change its name to “Deconomist” — because that’s what Verizon mistakenly called the Suffolk mold-removal company in its SuperPages advertisement.

Verizon apparently picked up the name from an older draft of the ad and wouldn’t fix that mistake and others in ensuing proofs, owner Simon Kiser said. After he called, Verizon assured him that the errors would be fixed before the book was published. They weren’t.

“It would be funny if it didn’t cost me money,” he said.

In the “blue pages,” or government listings, seven departments and four schools for the Richmond suburb of Hanover County were left out of the directory. Of the remaining 17 schools, 11 had the wrong phone numbers. More than 50 administrative listings for the county’s school board were omitted.

Laura Wurdeman says she began contacting Verizon five years ago about the errors and omissions related to her pet care business, Creature Comforts. For three years, she said, she couldn’t get anything fixed, and her small company in suburban Richmond almost collapsed.

“It was a nightmare for me,” Wurdeman said. “Every year, I’d be shocked that they’d get it wrong again.”

The State Corporation Commission says it plans to collect comments from Virginia residents until March 25 and issue a staff report over the summer. The agency could then order Verizon to take certain actions to make the directories more accurate. If it failed to make changes, Verizon could face fines up to $5,000 per offense.