A policeman ensuring sanity at the ECG Project Office when the ECG customers besieged the office

PURC to slap ECG with penalties over prepaid system challenges

Jasmine Arku Dec - 07 - 2017 , 13:35 2 minutes read

The Public Utilities Regulatory Commission (PURC) has demanded the Electricity Company of Ghana (ECG) to show cause why it should not be penalised in the wake of challenges with the purchase of credit for prepaid meters since last Sunday.

This is because the ECG has failed to comply with a directive from the PURC to submit details of its emergency response measures in the wake of the challenges being faced by prepaid meter consumers.

The directive, according to the PURC, elapsed at 4pm on Wednesday, December 6, 2017.

“Because they did not meet our deadline with regards to reforms, we have decided to initiate our enforcement action with regards to penalty. So we have gone further to require from them to give us a true cause as to why we should not implement our monetary penalties,” the Executive Secretary of the Commission, Mami Dufie Ofori said in a radio interview on Accra-based Citi MF.

“Our aim is that based on the methodology we will use to calculate, customers would likely get a credit on their meters as compensation,” she explained.

The PURC in an earlier statement signed by the Executive Secretary explained that in line with its mandate to ensure the provision of quality supply of service and protect the interest of consumers, it directed the ECG to immediately augment its help desks in the affected districts.

It said that directive was complied with even though it was inadequate.

Following that, the PURC further directed the ECG to submit details of its emergency response measures by 4pm on Wednesday but that directive was not complied with.

“This has been followed up with a second directive to ECG requesting the company to show cause in terms of monetary penalties to be imposed with a response deadline of December 8, 2017 in accordance with due process,” the statement added.

The Commission said it would further conduct a “comprehensive independent investigations into ECG’s IT infrastructure to ascertain the root cause of the system failure which will inform further regulatory actions.”