The Reggies Engen One-Stop has been a loyal customer of Power-Star for more than seven years. They regularly use our bill verification tool that’s available on our platform. At the beginning of 2019, they approached us when they noticed that the kWh rate they’re being charged has increased with more than 85% in a year. Not knowing if this was correct, they asked us if there was anything they could do about this steep increase. We investigated and found that they are being charged incorrectly on their bill by the municipality.
We quickly climbed on board to help them with a billing dispute. For more than six years their utility bills matched their Power-Star data. After conducting an in-depth investigation, we found a few reasons for their high bill. It turned out that the municipality changed the tariff they’re on to a tariff that is wrong. The new tariff was a hybrid tariff of the existing approved tariffs. There was also a demand charge incorrectly applied to this wrong tariff. This resulted in them being incorrectly billed R28,394.80 more on their December 2018 bill than what they should have been.
We investigated further and found that the overbilling started in March of 2018. The result of this was that the total amount of overbilling came to R203,287.00 for this period. They were underbilled on charges and overbilled on their consumption. Unfortunately, some municipalities take longer than others to rectify their error and the adjustment only happened in June 2019, with a credit to their account of R623,808.03.
We, together with the team at the Reggies One-Stop, are very pleased with the outcome of this billing dispute. Pieter van Eeden, director of Reggies One-Stop, gave us the following kind words: “Thanks very much for your help with this investigation that saves us a lot of money. Your detailed report was definitely one of the reasons that the municipality realise that they were dealing with a professional company. Thanks a million. We really appreciate the effort and time that you put into this.”
Overcharging on utility bills are more common than one would assume. We recommend that you regularly check and verify your bill by using your online Power-Star platform. To find out how to do a bill verification, you can read more here. If you have any queries about your bill or need us to assist you in a billing dispute, feel free to contact us today.
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