Town, third-party vendor spar over bills

The town is urging residents to pay their bills directly to the town’s preferred vendor instead of using a third-party online competitor that allows people to aggregate all of their utility payments through a single account.

The town alleges the vendor, doxo, has “falsely identified itself ” as a provider for the town and is not only charging residents for services but may also be making the payments late due to their processing timeframe.

“As the town works to rectify the misleading claims of this vendor, we urge all town residents

to only use specified payment services found on our official town website,” said Supervisor Steven Tommasone in a prepared statement. “We are committed to providing our community reliable and honest services and will continue to work with the town to eliminate any falsehoods.”

The Seattle-based company pushed back on the accusations.

“I can’t explain why the inaccurate information was released by the town,” said a doxo spokesperson.

Users can pay any biller for free with their bank account and manage all of their due dates in one place, according to the company.

Payments have been coming from doxo users to the town since 2017, and there are 130 users that have the town listed as one of the billers in their account.

Yet the town said they are aware of only at least eight instances where payments were made through the website, “although the total monies paid are not known at this time,” said Brittany Kenny, a spokesperson for Martin Group, the townenlisted public relations firm that issued a press release late Wednesday outlining the accusations.

At the root of the flap is timing over property and school tax payments, as well as water bill payments.

Taxes with the payment deadline June 30 was the first collection where the town has been notified of doxo’s involvement, according to the Martin Group.

After completing their payment, residents have received a confirmation, which says their payment is processing “with the assumption the process is made by the town of Rotterdam,” according to Martin. “This is untrue and has resulted in late payments.”

Doxo disputes the late payments and provided screen shots of examples that outline the timeline for payment schedules, indicating dates and benchmarks (although the images were samples and not Rotterdam-related).

The company also disputes they’ve identified themselves as a townaffiliated provider, but rather people can voluntarily sign up and include Rotterdam as one of their billers.

“We’d welcome the opportunity to work with the town to help reduce consumer fees and improve the bill pay experience,” said the doxo spokesperson.

The company works with 100,000 billers across the U.S., including National Grid, and has over 5 million users, according to their website. The town is steering residents to its own preferred third-party service that also collects fees.

This isn’t the first time doxo has been flagged by localities for what they perceive to be questionable practices.

A rural Pennsylvania police department issued a similar warning late last month.

But officials later backtracked and confirmed that doxo “is not a fraudulent company” and that the resident who sparked an investigation “visited another site created by a fraudulent enterprise,” according to FOX 43, a York, Pa.-based network.