The City of Johannesburg has offered residents that have been battling with billing issues up to 50% off their bills, because it hasn't been able to sort them out in time.
The Democratic Alliance (DA) claims the city hasn't been able to sort out problems with many of the bills because it misplaced data when Johannesburg migrated its legacy systems onto a new SAP platform. It alleges this is probably the reason why discounts are being offered.
The city finished implementing project Phakama in the middle of last year, at a cost of R580 million. The SAP migration aimed to move its disparate legacy systems onto a single system that would allow for greater accountability and better controls.
However, city residents have been frustrated since the move, with many reports of hugely inflated bills that residents have been unable to resolve through the Joburg Connect call centre.
About 80 000 residents, or 8% of the one million account-holders in the city, have queried their bills. The cause of the billing crisis is issues with the post-implementation phase of project Phakama.
The city is battling with the integrity of the data that it is migrating from the old systems onto SAP, and there have been issues interfacing new SAP modules with some departments, such as the deeds office and credit control management.
In addition, some staff members have negligently or maliciously sent out bills that clearly contained errors.
Our mess
Stan Maphologela, deputy director of customer communications in the city's Revenue and Customer Relations Department, says the city has made progress in sorting out issues, and has resolved about half of all queries.
Yet, Maphologela concedes, some bills have not been sorted out in a reasonable time. As a result, the city is offering people discounts on their bills. He says the discount is to make up for the “mistake that we have done” as some bills would not have been in arrears if they were correct in the first place.
The discounts are limited to people who have logged a dispute after being invoiced an unusually high amount. Maphologela could not say how many people would benefit from the discounts as queries are a “moving target”.
Johannesburg is offering a settlement that will see residents with billing queries that have dragged on for more than 90 days, but less than a year, pay 75% of the outstanding bill. Customers with queries that are older than a year will pay half the outstanding amount.
Maphologela did not explain how this would resolve residents' queries, or whether the settlement aimed to bring invoices back in line with the average billing amount. He says very few bills were grossly inflated.
Johannesburg is owed more than R10 billion by city account-holders, of which R6 billion is at various stages in the credit control process and the balance of R4 billion is under investigation.
Come clean
DA city councillor John Mendelsohn says residents have informed him that city officials have reported that data has gone missing, and that the city cannot prove the amounts it claims are outstanding. He says it is ridiculous for residents to have to negotiate settlements on bills that can not be backed up with accurate data.
DA caucus leader Vasco da Gama adds it is likely the city is offering discounts to residents because it has lost data, and can't back up the bills. Da Gama says the city must admit data has gone missing, as this is the only explanation for incorrect addresses and wrong meter numbers on bills.
Fred Nel, a DA member of the Gauteng Provincial Legislature, says lost data would be a serious breach of governance, and could cost the city a “huge amount”.
Nel says the city would have already paid Eskom and Joburg Water for commodities that have been used, but could find itself unable to collect this money from residents, because it can't prove they consumed what the city has billed them for.
The city should come clean and admit to lost data if this is the case, says Nel. It should write off accounts it can't fix because of inaccurate information and start billing on a clean sheet.
Despite the anecdotal evidence that the city has lost billing information, Maphologela, says “the city has not lost any data”.
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