Errors lead to funeral double-billing
Ottawa company apologizes for ‘extra stresses’ issue created
When Sarah Harrison received a bill for nearly $6,000 from Hulse, Playfair & McGarry after her 94-year-old grandmother’s death in April, she was taken aback. “I thought, ‘Wait a second, I already paid for all this.’ ”
Harrison had prepaid the funeral for her grandmother, Sheila Wren, at the prominent Ottawa company’s chapel at 150 Woodroffe Ave. in 2011. But when Hulse, Playfair & McGarry said it had no record of the payment, she began to doubt herself.
“I thought maybe I’d arranged it, but I hadn’t paid,” she said. “I was going through boxes, trying to find cancelled cheques.”
Fortunately Harrison, who runs her own business in Melancthon, Ont., north of Orangeville, is an organized person. She was able to locate a copy of the pre-arrangements and emailed it to the company.
Three days later, Hulse, Playfair & McGarry sent her an adjusted invoice for $843.25, which included a $495 fee for “cemetery equipment and set up” — a service she also thought she’d paid for in 2011. At the company’s request, Harrison emailed a copy of that documentation, as well.
Her troubles weren’t over yet. She received two more erroneous invoices, including one dated May 9 for $559.35 that still listed the prepaid charge for cemetery equipment and set up.
“Even when they agreed that I’d already paid an amount,” Harrison said, “they still sent me a bill for it again. I literally had to go back to them three times to get the bill settled.
“I felt like I was banging my head against a wall, trying to sort it out.”
It wasn’t until May 30 — four weeks after her grandmother’s funeral — that Hulse, Playfair & McGarry sent her an invoice showing the funeral was paid in full.
Harrison was so upset that she filed a formal complaint in July with the Bereavement Authority of Ontario, an industry-funded, notfor-profit corporation that administers provisions and associated regulations of the Funeral, Burial and Cremation Services Act on behalf of the Ontario government. A BAO inspector subsequently contacted Hulse, Playfair & McGarry for an explanation.
In her complaint, Harrison expressed “serious concerns that if this happened to me, it could well have happened to other customers.
“People don’t think clearly when they are bereaved,” she wrote. “It seems ridiculous to be spelling this out, but a funeral home must keep accurate financial records.”
She said her cousin, the other executor on her grandmother’s estate, told her he would have assumed the bill was accurate and paid it in full had it been sent to him.
On Friday, Patrick McGarry, who co-owns the company with Sharon McGarry, explained the “confusion” in a letter to the Citizen.
He said the “most significant contributing factor” was that the prepaid funeral arrangement was not with Hulse, Playfair & McGarry, but with McGarry Memorial Funeral Home, a separate company in Wakefield, which has its own files and independent operation.
The Wakefield company is owned by the Brian McGarry Family Trust, controlled by Sharon McGarry and her ex-husband Brian McGarry, who was fired by Hulse, Playfair & McGarry in 2014, sparking a legal battle between the firm and its one-time chief executive and public face.
Initially, the funeral director at Hulse, Playfair & McGarry was unable to locate any record of the prepaid funeral arrangement, leading him to bill Harrison for the full amount, Patrick McGarry said.
Complicating matters further was that the contract showed some items, including a fee for cemetery equipment, that had not been prepaid, he said.
Despite that, “we discovered that it had in fact been included in the original quote.
“Unfortunately, due to an inadvertent error, that item had failed to be reflected on the final prepaid contract. When it was pointed out to us, the director removed the cost as a good-faith measure.”
When Harrison’s complaint reached his desk, McGarry said he reviewed everything closely. “I wanted to make sure that we did everything we could to make it right.”
The company also provided additional services worth more than $1,000 at no cost to the family, he said. “Although rare in occurrence, when a problem or issue arises, our approach is to quickly and directly resolve it.”
He said the funeral firm has “reviewed and refined” its processes to prevent similar errors in the future, “including updating our software program to close any gap in information.”
McGarry spoke to Harrison by phone Friday. “I was finally able to explain to her the full situation and to apologize for the extra stresses that the billing issue created.”
In light of McGarry’s explanation, Michael D’Mello, the BAO’s manager of licensing, said he saw no need to continue the investigation into the complaint.
After speaking to McGarry, Harrison said she was still struggling. “He was very apologetic and described a series of unfortunate errors with no ill intent, and said if a prepaid funeral was paid for again, in error, the double payment would have been caught and corrected at year end,” she said.
“On the other hand, I am still not convinced that this couldn’t have, or hasn’t, happened to someone else.”