The Office of Utilities Regulation (OUR) has directed the National Water Commission (NWC) to stop charging customers late payment fee on bills for which there are amounts outstanding, with immediate effect.

The OUR in a statement today (Apl 28), says the water commission has also been directed to cease the practice of sending multiple bills within a single billing cycle.

Only one bill should be sent to customers per billing cycle.

The OUR directive to the NWC came on March 31 and since then, the water company has submitted information on the issues that led to the erroneous application of the late payment fee and the steps it has taken to address them

NWC has also indicated that it will comply fully with the OUR’s directive.

The utility regulator says it is assessing the NWC’s response and will make a determination.

OUR Public Education Specialist Elizabeth Bennett says complaints from customers led to the investigation.

Consequently, the NWC advised the OUR that in 2016 it halted temporarily  the application of the late payment  fee.

Without notifying the utility regulator that the issues were resolved, the NWC announced in February that it had resumed the programme.

The OUR says it is against this background that it  deemed it necessary to direct the NWC to cease the application of late payment fees to accounts with outstanding balances.

The NWC explained that the late fee was applied where customers initially received estimated bills, but subsequent actual meter readings for the same billing period indicated that consumption was underestimated.

In such instances, although customers would have paid the estimated bills, the NWC did not consider that the bill was paid in full, and so the late payment fee was applied.

Regarding the issuance of multiple bills to customers during a billing cycle, the OUR took the position that customers reasonably expect to be issued with one bill in a single period.