Report rips Hydro One for ‘deception’ of customers
Hydro One’s indifference to tens of thousands of customer complaints about a disastrous new billing system is proof it can’t be trusted to clean up its own messes, says Ontario Ombudsman André Marin.
But that’s the one conclusion in a harsh report on the provincial utility, which Marin released Monday, that the provincial government doesn’t agree with. It’s planning to sell a majority stake in the electricity-distribution company that runs the province’s heavy-duty transmission grid and also delivers power directly to 1.3 million customers, including on the outskirts of Ottawa.
Along the way, the province will remove Marin’s power to dig into Hydro One’s affairs.
He’s to be replaced with an internal corporate ombudsman, someone who ultimately answers not to the legislature, but to Hydro One’s management. Internal ombuds are just not as good, Marin said.
“Some might say they might better be described as ‘ombudsweenies,’” Marin said. “I think this report is ample evidence that that is not good enough.”
His latest report is well over a year in the making, begun when Marin started getting complaints after Hydro One installed a new $180-million billing system in 2013. After he publicly called for people to contact him with their stories, a stream of complaints turned into a geyser. The system started barfing up bills practically at random. It didn’t have one single problem, it had many.
Marin’s report mentions an Ottawa man who got a new electricity meter installed and then received a bill for $11,000 — for five years’ worth of electricity that he’d already paid for. “It took him over a year, some 40 calls to the call centre, five escalated complaints to managers, and ultimately the intervention of our Office to get the mess sorted out,” Marin’s report says.
Another guy complained about a $37,000 bill, was promised it would be fixed, and then got a bill for $37 million.
The military base at Petawawa got a $4,500 bill one month and then a $50-million bill the next.
Thousands of people on automatic payment plans had money sucked wrongly out of their bank accounts.
Tens of thousands of customers got bills based on estimated consumption when Hydro One had real readings available.
“Hydro One reacted in the worst possible way,” Marin said in his news conference releasing the report. “With deflection and deception. It minimized the issues. It misled its overseers, including the Ontario Energy Board, the minister of Energy, its board of directors. It relied on public-relations spin, it put its customers last.”
Marin’s report details the ways in which Hydro One’s account of the billing problems changed over time, particularly how the number of customers it admitted were involved bounced up and down depending on the audience. It took ages for the company to be honest with him, he said.
The company saw the problem as an essentially technical one, Marin said. It didn’t recognize that screwing tens of thousands of customers was actually a much more serious thing. Because Hydro One is a monopoly, it didn’t have to care.
Hydro One has previously admitted it handled the situation poorly and on Monday it adopted a position of near-total prostration.
“We had a problem with our billing system. And we focused on fixing the technical issues but we failed to appreciate how our actions would affect our customers. We let them down and then we didn’t treat them well when they had a problem,” its chief executive Carm Marcello said.
He reminded everyone that the company’s linemen go out in the worst weather to fix downed power lines and don’t stop till they’re all back. “My work now is to take this same service-centric approach and drive it into every aspect of our organization,” Marcello said.
He did, however, deny that the company ever lied to the Ontario Energy Board, which regulates it, or the Energy minister.
Marin said that although those are serious allegations (it’s an offence to obstruct an ombudsman’s investigation), he doesn’t intend to pursue charges.
“I don’t think prosecuting people would advance the cause, because it was endemic to the system,” Marin said.
Of the 66 recommendations he’s made for Hydro One, from improving training to making its complaints process crystal-clear, the company has accepted 65. The 66th, about keeping Marin’s oversight in place even after the province sells 60 per cent of the company, is dead on arrival.