DA cries foul over Joburg billing glitch

The City of Johannesburg has been struck by a crippling failure of its billing system, with more than half its April bills affected. This might result in a R1.3bn cash shortfall.

On Wednesday, the DA said it suspected that the system had been tampered with.

The crisis comes a day before the DA-led coalition government presents its first budget.

About 85% of the city’s R55.9bn budget is dependent on revenue raised from ratepayers and consumers.

In a statement yesterday, executive mayor Herman Mashaba said the failure in the customer service system resulted in 412,000 monthly accounts not being issued, while 97,000 statements were issued incorrectly.

The city was working to ensure all accounts were issued this week and those issued incorrectly were corrected.

“This will result in certain households receiving two statements this month; we apologise for any confusion caused. Double billing is a historical issue in our city and we have plans in place to ensure it is a thing of the past by the end of June 2017,” Mashaba said.

The automated system had never produced an error of this margin and he suspected the system had been tampered with, he said.

The mayor said he had instructed the city to engage with law enforcement agencies and the cybercrimes unit to investigate the system failure.

Mayoral committee member for finance Rabelani Dagada was more blunt than Mashaba and told Business Day on Wednesday the city was “very suspicious that there are officials sabotaging us”.

This could be for one of two reasons, he said: either because the officials differed politically with the government, or disgruntled officials who had been disciplined, suspended or had criminal cases opened against them wanted to hit back at the council.

“It could be that this is a way of fighting back,” Dagada said. “We are very suspicious. This has never happened before and it was not supposed to happen.”

He wanted one of the metro’s senior information technology (IT) technicians suspended “by the end of the week or as soon as possible”, he said.

The employee had told him the system had crashed, but Dagada said the system had already become dysfunctional on May 5 and he had not been informed. Dagada’s team picked

up the problem last week and it was attended to only after its intervention. Dagada charged that the official’s negligence had resulted in the system failure.

“If he [the IT technician] was not negligent, this would not have happened,” Dagada said.

The billing system has been mired in crisis for years, but this scale of failure is a first in the metro, which is governed by a coalition government after the ANC lost power in August 2016.

Dagada said the billing problem would make it difficult to implement credit-management control to ensure consumers paid back their debt.

While the city was terminating services to defaulting consumers, it now faced consumer complaints that it had sent out credit-management notices, but not statements.

Dagada said that even though the shortfall might be just more than R1.3bn, he believed the revenue could be recovered.

The accounts in question constituted more than half of the city’s estimated 1-million statements sent out each month, he said. The city bills consumers for about R2.6bn per month.

Mashaba said during his state of the city address that the process to appoint a service provider who “will assist us to resolve the billing challenge” was continuing and he hoped to finalise an appointment by the end of this financial year.

The Greater Johannesburg ANC blamed the billing crisis on Mashaba’s “poor leadership”.

It said it noted that allegations of sabotage had been made but “it was ironic that when the IT systems failed during the tenure of the ANC government, the DA was quick to say that the ANC government was grossly incompetent”.

The ANC said Mashaba had a negative effect on morale, which could be behind the crisis.