The City of Johannesburg’s (CoJ’s) billing system is in such disarray that former homeowners are still being billed months after selling.
While the Auditor-General has issued a qualified audit, a think tank warns the city is spending money it doesn’t have, and the city itself admits its billing failures threaten its finances – yet it claims 98% billing accuracy.
Cor van Deventer, director at law firm Van Deventer Dowlath & Marx, says former homeowners across Johannesburg, which accounts for 16% of South Africa’s gross domestic product, are receiving monthly municipal bills long after they have moved out – sometimes accompanied by threats of disconnection or notices of “illegal” meters they never installed.
“These post-transfer billing errors are no longer rare anomalies – they’ve become a recurring pattern that’s exposing sellers to financial risk even after they have legally severed ties with the property,” he said in a statement this week.
Van Deventer says delays and mismatched records within the city’s systems result in accounts remaining active after properties have changed hands. In some cases, the transfer is recorded in one department but not reflected across the city’s systems, he adds.
“These are structural issues within the city’s processes,” Van Deventer says.
The city agrees, sort of
Van Deventer’s concerns about billing issues are reflected in the city’s own documents, as it warns that revenue is being eroded through issues such as inaccurate billing, which threatens its financial stability.
The city’s Integrated Development Plan (IDP) for 2026/27 says its revenue base has been eroded by several factors, including “billing system failures”. It adds that “no other pillar matters if this one fails”.
Executive deputy mayor and finance MMC Loyiso Masuku in May acknowledged pressure on the city’s revenue base after its collection rate fell to 86% from 88.6%, partly due to billing inefficiencies and revenue leakages.
The Auditor-General of South Africa has flagged that 76% of money owed to the CoJ is unlikely to be recovered.
By the numbers
These concerns are echoed by the Centre for Development and Enterprise (CDE), which says the city “spends money it does not collect”. Gross unpaid bills owed to Johannesburg have risen from about R15 billion in 2014/15, to nearly R72 billion in 2024/25 – an increase of almost 17% a year for more than a decade, the CDE said this week.
The think tank’s executive director Ann Bernstein says: “The city has become dangerously disconnected from financial reality. It bills residents and businesses, records those bills as revenue and spends on the assumption that the money will arrive. Increasingly, it doesn’t.”
In its 2024/25 annual report, the latest available, the CoJ admits that “missing customer records” were impacting the successful delivery of invoices and statements, while ineffective payment arrangements were “delaying debt recovery”.
“Revenue collection and billing system accuracy remain priority areas requiring urgent attention. Sound revenue management is fundamental to the city’s ability to fund and sustain service delivery,” writes mayor Dada Morero. Yet, its R97 billion medium-term budget projects a R2.1 billion operating surplus this year despite ongoing threats to financial sustainability.
The city’s spokespeople had not answered ITWeb’s specific questions on whether there were still issues with the billing systems and what was being done to correct these.
The CoJ’s own annual report claims an accuracy rate of 98% for “bills to all active customers”.
However, the city’s IDP notes that, having identified billing inaccuracy, it aims to modernise billing and metering systems across its trading services by moving from “passive billing to active revenue intelligence” as it seeks “improved billing and meter accuracy”.
Try, try, and try again
Morero writes in the annual report that the city is “actively pursuing improvements in these areas as part of its broader financial recovery and stabilisation agenda”. The annual report points to tighter credit control, automation through its SAP project and cleaner customer data.
By the end of the 2025 financial year, the city had spent R119.1 million on the upgrade, which it said was nearing completion.
The city has a history of failed SAP implementations. In 2011, ITWeb broke the news that 65 000 account-holders faced inflated bills and disconnection threats following Project Phakama, its R580 million attempt to move disparate and legacy billing systems onto SAP.
Then mayor Amos Masondo denied there was a crisis, saying only 8% of residents were affected.
The IDP also acknowledges that billing is one of the main sources of dissatisfaction among residents, alongside electricity, roads, water and safety.
“Over the past eight years, satisfaction with key services in Johannesburg has declined. Community feedback surveys consistently point to safety and infrastructure reliability: particularly energy, roads, and more recently, water; and billing as the main sources of dissatisfaction,” the plan says.
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