The City of Johannesburg says it has sorted out the inherent problems with its billing systems, and the billing crisis, which affected thousands of residents for more than a year-and-a-half, has come to an end.
More than 65 000 residents were affected by the city's chaotic billing system, which has been problematic since the council started migrating its assorted billing platforms onto SAP towards the end of 2009.
Residents complained for months about grossly inflated bills, inaccurate meter readings, illegal disconnections and a lack of service from the city's call centre.
The problem with the billing system was due to post-implementation issues with project Phakama, the city's R580 million SAP implementation, aimed at moving its disparate legacy systems onto a single platform, to allow for greater accountability and better controls.
The project was completed in the middle of last year, but residents have had issues with bills since November 2009 when Phakama started being rolled out in suburbs in the west of Johannesburg.
Former Joburg mayor Amos Masondo admitted in January that there was a problem with the billing system, but argued this was not a crisis and only affected about 80 000 residents. Masondo later indicated the issue would take up to two years to fix.
However, the city now claims the inherent system problems have been resolved and only “one or two” residents report issues after each statement cycle, which are not linked to the system upgrade.
This contradicts information provided by an advocacy group, which says it gets calls after each bill run complaining about new issues.
Fixed
Stan Maphologela, deputy director of customer communications in the city's revenue and customer relations department, says the issues plaguing Joburg residents for months have been resolved.
Maphologela says billing complaints are limited to one or two a month, and usually relate to faulty meters or similar, minor, issues. “The city has overcome the issue... We have stabilised.”
Recently-elected mayor Parks Tau said, after his appointment following this year's local government elections in May, the situation would be sorted out. “I want to give you the assurance that we are well aware of the issues that need to be addressed.”
The city has fulfilled its promise to solve the problem through several interventions in a bid to sort out the issue, says Maphologela. Its measures included a task team and a dedicated call centre. However, Maphologela did not clarify what IT changes were done to the SAP system to resolve the problem.
In total, 65 000 queries were received by the city and more than 52 000 have already been resolved. City officials are working around the clock to resolve the remaining queries and all outstanding queries should be cleared within a month or two, says Maphologela.
In the meantime, customers who have logged queries, received reference numbers and confirmation that the account is flagged will not be cut off, says a statement from the city.
The billing issues stemmed from different sets of data across old systems that were not linked, old meters and human errors in capturing meter readings, says Maphologela. All these issues have been sorted out, he adds.
Maphologela says the city is accountable and committed to providing regular information in a bid to uphold the principle of transparency and openness.
Not possible
Lee Cahill, founding member of the Joburg Advocacy Group (JAG), says the fundamental problems have not been addressed and the city cannot possibly have resolved so many errors in such a short timeframe. “If you do the math, there is no way.”
The advocacy group says the city would have had to resolve more than 700 queries every working day since Masondo's January statement, while the recently established National Consumer Commission (NCC) has only fixed an average of 1.3 issues a day.
The NCC came into being as a result of the implementation of the Consumer Protection Act. By mid-April it had received 35 complaints and was intervening in a bid to get the problem sorted out once and for all.
ITWeb has not received any further communication on the issue and is not able to get hold of the NCC's spokespeople, despite several attempts.
Cahill says the city's figures can't be verified. JAG is still getting complaints from people who are frustrated at the city's systems, says Cahill. In addition, after every statement run, there are new problems, she adds.
“As we continue to receive complaints from residents about unresolved billing disputes, we can only assume that the fundamental system problems have not been addressed.” Cahill says there should be an independent forensic investigation of Joburg's billing system.
Maphologela says JAG is entitled to views that “do not reflect the true picture of events due to insufficient information at its disposal”. He says JAG has a lack of understanding of Joburg's internal resolution process.
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