Open day tackles billing queries

THE City of Joburg claims that 88% of some 2000 queries presented on Saturday at the open day in Marks Park, were resolved.

Hosting the first of its open days which will be held throughout the city, member of the mayoral committee for finance, Rabelani Dagada said that the billing crisis will be “history” by the end of the 2017/18 financial year.

The mayor of Joburg, Herman Mashaba, also recently announced that should this not have improved by the end of December, residents were welcome to “kick” him out of office.

However, Dagada said that hundreds of previously-frustrated customers left pleased with the city’s attempt to bring its front line services to their doorstep, “to enable the prompt resolution of lingering billing woes. It was a testament to the fact that the municipality is determined to eradicate billing issues while curbing its increasing debt”.

Mashaba and Dagada led a high-level team from the revenue shared services centre (RSSC) to assist customers to resolve long-standing billing issues as well as settle their debt with the city.

Services offered at Emmarentia’s Marks Park during the open day, he said, included adjustments on disputed accounts, electricity consumption queries, as well as refuse, sewer and tariff queries. The city also dealt with requests to link or de-link meters and water consumption queries.

“By the end of the second week of August, including the open day, a total of 88% of billing queries logged for the months of May and June, including those on August 12 had been resolved. The city expects the oldest billing query in its system to be only from February 2017; effectively meaning that long-standing billing issues are being resolved expeditiously,” he said.

Currently, only 17 797 billing queries are yet to be resolved. Of these, 53% are 30 days old, 30.87% were between 31 to 60 days old, while 7.98% are between 61 to 90 days old. The city expects to resolve all queries older than 90 days by the end of August, he added.

Attorney Chantelle Gladwin, who specialises in municipal matters, said the city seems to think that the oldest billing queries that must still be resolved are from around February.

“They have a big surprise coming when they realise that this is not true, because the city’s systems keeps unlawfully closing unresolved queries after 30 days or so. They also report that there are around 17 000 unresolved queries. This seems unbelievably low to me, as a few thousand emanated from my office,” she said.

As such, Gladwin reminds residents to log their queries for matters that have not been resolved every month. “In some cases, you will be told that your prior query was closed and you need to log a new one, and in other cases you will be told that you don’t need to log a new one because your old one is still open. It is always better to err on the side of caution and phone to check, lest you receive a pre-termination notice – or worse, you are cut off without a pre-termination notice – as a result of the city not having any record of your query,” she added.

Dagada told The Star recently, that the system of closing unresolved accounts, had stopped.