PURC directs ECG to suspend new billing software
The Public Utilities Regulatory Commission (PURC) has ordered the Electricity Company of Ghana (ECG) to suspend the use of its new billing software until further notice.
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In a statement issued in Accra yesterday, the commission said the order had been necessitated by the overwhelming complaints the commission had received from ECG consumers regarding issues of over-billing.
It said the PURC, after a thorough investigation into complaints about over-billing, concluded that there were, indeed, anomalies associated with the use of the new billing software.
It said some of the key issues that came to the fore during the commission’s monitoring and investigation exercise were the fact that the ECG was billing customers over irregular periods from 18 to 43 days, which was in contravention of the 28-day billing cycle.
The exercise, according to the statement, also indicated that “some customers are billed above the PURC approved service charge and approved tariffs by the PURC in December 2015”.
Furthermore, it said, the ECG was billing customers who had been disconnected over a period of six months with the accumulated debt instead of their monthly actual consumption.
It said more than 62 per cent of the complaints received by the commission in the first quarter of 2016 were issues of over-billing, compared with the previous year’s 18 per cent.
Other findings
The statement said customer billing data showed clearly that the ECG had challenges with migrating customer information from the old billing system onto the new one.
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It said investigations further revealed that the district frontline staff of the ECG who were entrusted to issue customer bills did not have the adequate technical capacity to accurately use the new billing software, hence the billing anomalies being experienced.
The PURC established that with the new billing software, the billing cycle of some customers was over a period of four years between 2015 and 2019.
Following the outcome of the monitoring and investigations, the statement said, the PURC had ordered the ECG to, with immediate effect, put in place measures to alleviate the plight of customers who had been slapped with high bills because of the implementation of the new billing system.
Directives
It directed the ECG to engage an independent billing software expert to audit the new billing system currently being rolled out and present a report to the commission within 10 working days.
Again, it asked the ECG to reconnect any customer who had been wrongfully billed and disconnected and correct all billing anomalies and re-bill all consumers who had been affected.
Furthermore, it advised the power distribution company to adequately train frontline staff to enable them to effectively implement the new billing system, as well as sensitise the public to its implementation.
The statement warned that the ECG’s non-compliance with the order would compel the PURC to sanction the company.
It urged all consumers who were experiencing problems with over-billing to report to the PURC immediately.
ECG responds
Meanwhile, the ECG has questioned the decision of the PURC to leak a memo it had written to the company ordering an indefinite suspension of the company’s new billing software to the media.
Responding to the PURC’s directives to the ECG, Mr William Boateng, the Public Relations Manager of the ECG, wondered whether the ECG should use the media to respond to the directives.
“Why write a memo to us and leak it to the media first? Is it to court public disaffection for us as an institution?” he asked.
He said the ECG was yet to receive official communication on the directives from the regulatory body.
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“The PURC has been very unfair to us. It is very unfortunate they are making us look like a stubborn organisation that does not want to be regulated. Over the years, we have borne all the grudges of the public because the regulator wants the public to know it is being hard on us,” Mr Boateng said in a telephone interview with the Daily Graphic.
He also wondered why the PURC failed to mention the issue when the ECG and officials of the Ministry of Power and the commission held a meeting last Monday in connection with the issue of the billing software.