On Wednesday, 14 August 2019, the MMC for Finance, Cllr Funzela Ngobeni and myself, had the opportunity to visit one of the City’s billing open days, currently taking place in Region F, in the south of Johannesburg.
The aim of the visit was to view the work being conducted by the City’s Finance Department in actively responding to unresolved billing queries which have historically been a source of frustration for residents.
The purpose of these open days is to provide our residents with an opportunity to resolve their long outstanding billing queries on the spot. On these days, emphasis is placed on attending to all unresolved queries that are older than 30 days.
Expert agents from City Power, Johannesburg Water, Pikitup, Valuations, Rates and Taxes, Planning, Billing Management, Customer Services and more are at hand to sort out all customers’ account related queries, with the hope of immediate resolution.
This also provides residents with a chance to take up their concerns with senior management in the City, who will ensure each account receives the desired attention.
While I am the first to admit – there is a lot of work still to be done in addressing all problems within our billing value chain, I am pleased to report that we are progressively making significant strides.
To date we have 9000 bill-related queries outstanding. This translates to less than 1% of all our bills.
This is as compared to 100 000 when we first began tackling the City’s billing challenges when we took over this administration
While international standards vary between 7 and 10 percent – I am of the firm belief that the effect felt by the 1% residents of our system who struggle with billing – has a very real – very tangible impact. One client receiving an incorrect bill is one too many.
To that end, these billing open days hope to provide assistance to residents who struggle with billing challenges.
Over and above this, by making sure we improve the City’s billing process, we can make sure that we not only increase revenue for financing much needed services but we also reduce the overall burden on each residents with respect to rates and taxes.
It is well known that one of the challenges faced by the City is with respect to illegal connections where City services are utilised but never paid for.
This only serves to punish law abiding residents who have to shoulder the burden of increasing tariff as a result of this illegal activity.
By making sure that every resident who can afford to pay for services does so, and making sure that those currently using services but are not on our system are brought into the fold, we can reduce the strain felt by residents across the board.
It is through such initiatives as billing open days that I hope that in the future, the City will be in a position to be collecting enough revenue so as to pass a budget with minimal increases on rates and tariffs for residents.
However, this cannot be done unless we all play our part.
That is why the City is running an end-to-end audit of the City’s supply of water and electricity.
This will be done utilising GIS and databases of the City’s infrastructure to assess every property in the billing system. It will enable the City to assess that owners are being charged according to their usage of services.
The aim of this process will be to identify those developments or properties which are non-compliant and connected to the City’s water, electricity and sewer services illegally.
There’s no doubt that there are individuals who are connecting to services illegally. The City is also aware that some tenants are unaware that the owners of the properties they occupy are owners are evading the law and not paying for services.
Lost revenue directly impacts the City’s ability to maintain our infrastructure and continue projects.
As government, our approach will not be to continue squeezing the law-abiding, paying customers of our City, but rather those who can pay but do not.
I would like to encourage members of the public that have any information about illegal connections to come forward and report it to the City’s fraud hotline at 0800 002 587.
This is blatant theft, and we cannot allow law-abiding, paying residents of our City to continue footing the bill for these practices.
I would like to extend my sincere gratitude to the MMc for Finance, Cllr Funzela Ngobeni for political leadership and the Group CFO, Manenzhe Manenzhe, and his team for the sterling work in turning around the finance department.