Seems customers can’t win with the SABC
I wanted to ask your opinion about the SABC and their licensing department. We have every year for the past 35 years received an invoice and paid our TV licence. This year no invoice arrived and I didn’t notice as we lead very busy lives.
Suddenly we are plagued with phone calls from “VVM” who are a legal company collecting overdue licence fees. We explained several times that we had not received an invoice and had no idea how much the fee even is and could they please send the invoice. To no avail.
Finally we got a call yesterday from a rather rude young woman from the same company who told me the time for invoices “is past” and I must “look on the website to see how much I owe” and we now owe penalties as well. What next? If I treated my clients like that I wouldn’t last very long in business.
I told her that it is illegal to hand over non-payers or to charge penalties unless you can prove that invoices have been received. Surely one needs to deliver by registered mail a final demand before handing a person over?
She just carried on and on repeating herself and as I couldn’t hear her for the noise in the background. I just hung up. Thirty minutes later an invoice including penalties arrived by email as I had requested two weeks before.
It’s a tiny amount of money. That is not the point, but the rudeness and being told to “look it up on the website” just made me furious and I hope that something can be done about this. Why must the whole country pay penalties for invoices not received? It’s just another money making racket I suspect. Kathy Divaris
Kaizer Kganyago, SABC spokesperson, responds: “We are unable to get the details of this account as we do not have the account number.
“However, we will therefore have to provide general answers: TV Licences communicates with licence holders through SMS, e-mail, phone calls and post. These communication methods are not all applicable to one licence holder. Postal services are expensive and prolonged. They are used in the absence of cell numbers or e-mail addresses.
“TV Licences’ website was developed in order to provide licence holders with a ‘self-help’ tool. The various means of communication are to keep abreast of industry practices, to ensure speedy communication and make paying TV Licence fees hassle free, amongst others.
“Licence holders must ensure that they update their personal details with the SABC in order to receive the communication. TV Licences has campaigns every year where licence holders are requested to update their personal information, however the responses are low. This has an effect of TV Licences’ ability to make contact with the right licence holders.
An account is handed over to our debt collection agencies after all SABC internal processes have been exhausted.
Penalties are levied for late or non-payment of licence fees. The penalties are levied in accordance with the Broadcasting Act. The TV Licence Regulations also provide that licence holders are required to apply for the renewal of a television licence despite non-receipt of a reminder notice to renew a television licence.”
There you have it folks: customers are not updating their personal details online (no surprises), the postal service can’t be trusted and. even if you haven’t received your statement, you are still expected to pay because “it’s the right thing to do” and the law. And if you fail to pay for whatever reason, the debt collectors will deal with you in a high-handed, officious manner because they don’t owe loyal licence fee payers anything.