Joburg makes billing progress
2011-04-22 13:04
The City of Johannesburg has made significant progress in resolving residents’ complaints regarding its billing system, acting Co-operative Governance Minister Nathi Mthethwa said today.
“The city has more than a million account holders and in three months has achieved about 60% resolution of the billing problems,” Mthethwa said.
He said the progress must be applauded because it was happening within a context of an administration that was also dealing with systemic legacy challenges within the IT systems as a result of the fragmented past cities come from.
Nearly 36 000 of the 60 000 complaints lodged with the city from December last year have been resolved so far.
In resolving the problems the city put a moratorium on cut-offs on all queries that were not resolved for more than 90 days, in addition to an intensive training programme for staff and the suspension of the city’s credit control process to fast-track the resolution of all queries that were logged.
“The current status shows that while the figures stated by the media at the beginning of the year may have been exaggerated, remarkable progress has nonetheless been made, even as we acknowledge a few remaining challenges in the resolution of queries.”
He said a preliminary investigation following the public outcry about the city’s billing system could largely be attributed to municipal bills erroneously sent to residents during November and December last year.
The billing problem has resulted in residents receiving inflated bills and others having services cut off.
- SAPA