City of Johannesburg aims to make billing woes 'history'
14 August 2017
Johannesburg - The City of Johannesburg declared its ''Billing Open Day'' on Saturday a resounding success, and promised to get rid of the backlog of over 17 000 billing disputes soon.
This was after officials from the City of Johannesburg, notorious for its billing problems, set up shop at Mark's Park in Emmarentia to help customers with long-standing billing issues, and for them to settle debt owed to the city.
Mayor Herman Mashaba and the head of the city's finances Dr Rabelani Dagada went with a team from the Revenue Shared Services Centre to help with the disputed accounts, electricity and water consumption queries and meter issues, according to a statement on Sunday.
In the statement, Dagada said by the end of the second week of August, including the Billing Open Day, a total of 88% of billing queries logged for the months of May and June had been resolved.
However, there are still 17 797 billing queries to resolve.
''Of these, 53% are 30 days old, 30.87% are between 31 to 60 days old, while 7.98% are between 61 to 90 days old. The City expects to resolve all queries older than 90 days by the end of August 2017,'' Dagada said.
''We are taking decisions here and now. By the end of March next year, we will be talking about the legacy of the billing crisis and talking about it as if it’s history.''
Their goal is to make sure that 90% of all registered queries are no older than 30 days by December 2017.
Disputes resolved included a Sophiatown resident who had been billed on the wrong meter since 2010.
Similar Billing Open Days are planned for all regions of the metro to rectify incorrect accounts, and to fix anomalies in the system.
