The City of Johannesburg argues there was no need for the National Consumer Commission (NCC) to serve it with compliance notices, as it was already resolving the complaints.
The commission recently told a select trade and industry Parliamentary committee it had served 65 compliance notices on the city to force it to sort out outstanding issues. However, the city, in a statement, says it received 45.
ITWeb endeavoured to clarify the actual number of notices, but the city stands firm on only having being served with 45, while the NCC insists it was 65.
Johannesburg says it has objected to the National Consumer Tribunal (NCT), a higher body independent of the NCC. The commission will ask the tribunal, which it shares with the National Credit Regulator, to fine the city R15 million for non-compliance.
However, revenue and customer relations department spokesperson Stanley Maphologela argues there seems to be a communication breakdown between the city and the NCC, as the city was in the process of resolving the complaints for which compliance notices were issued.
“Meetings were thereafter scheduled with the NCC to streamline processes and develop cooperation,” says Maphologela. The city believes “the NCC may have acted before referring to the facts of the matter, as well as the legal framework governing local government”, which is why it has objected to the NCT over the notices.
Too soon?
The commission issued the city with 65 compliance notices, giving it until 9 September to resolve 11 issues, and until 15 September to sort out the rest. Commissioner Mamodupi Mohlala has said it failed to do so and the matter will now be referred to the tribunal, and the NCC will ask for a R15 million fine to be imposed.
However, the city argues it will be “premature” for the NCC to attempt to fine it R15 million for not complying with the notices, as complaints in the compliance notices have already been resolved.
Mohlala says if the city has sorted out complaints, it should not have objected, but rather indicated as much. “Then we would have recorded the matters as settled and then issued compliance certificates.”
The city says it has solved complaints, when customers say this is not the case, Mohlala has said.
Lee Cahill, founding member of the Joburg Advocacy Group, says the group's experience is it is very common for the city to say matters have been solved when this is not the case.
“In some cases, reference numbers have simply been marked as being resolved,” which is not the case, explains Cahill.
Disparity
The NCC, which came into being in April, has received 450 complaints from residents relating to the city's billing system. It achieved the reversal of a R7 million bill after Johannesburg could not explain how it arrived at a grossly inflated invoice.
Maphologela says, however, the city has only received 276 complaints from the NCC. Of these, 154 have already been resolved; 113 are pending and nine closed because of a lack of information.
In some of the outstanding matters, for example, there are no account numbers accompanying the complaint, says Maphologela in a statement.
Not all the complaints relate to the billing system or wrong bills, notes Maphologela, as some related to valuations, rates, public liability, and strikes. All queries relating to billing are being investigated and corrected where necessary, he says.
About 65 000 of the city's more than a million account-holders had problems with their bills after Johannesburg migrated its disparate legacy platforms onto a SAP system. The project, codenamed Phakama, was implemented between November 2009 and July last year at an estimated cost of about R1 billion.
Issues with post-implementation resulted in complaints from thousands of residents about grossly inflated bills, inaccurate meter readings, illegal disconnections and a lack of service from the city's call centre.
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