Some Enmax customers may soon be getting a surprise bill in the mail. A computer glitch at the company means some homeowners have not been billed properly; some owing six to eight months worth of electricity.
Monique Windrem moved into her small bungalow last June and opened a new electricity account with Enmax. She pays her bills through her bank online, and assumed she was up-to-date; until she received this month’s electricity bill of $539.
“They told me they had never billed me for electricity in almost eight months since my lease started, June 15th, 2009.”
Monique admits she should have noticed the problem before now, but says she assumed the total each month would be accurate.
“It was a little bit of negligence on my part for not investigating it further, but I rely on Enmax to give me a valid bill.”
Monique is not alone. There have been a number of complaints about Enmax backlog charges over the past six months, including several sent in to the Global newsroom.
Doris Kaufmann from Enmax Public Affairs says it has finally traced the problem to a software glitch when their billing system was upgraded last spring.
“We’ve now identified the root cause of it and that’s the most important part but we are seeing a bit of a spike in the number of people calling us to let us know that they’ve received these large bills.”
Customers still have to pay for the power they have used, even if the bill is extremely late; but Enmax says it’s flexible with payment plans.
“We don’t want to make unnecessary demands on them in terms of making those payments back because we understand that you know clearly we had a role to play in that.”
Monique Windrem feels they should do more than waive a $50 administration fee. She intends to take eight months to pay them back.
“If companies aren’t invoicing you for the correct amount on the bill don’t you think they have some responsibility for that?”
Enmax said the glitch has only affected about 5-thousand customers province-wide. By law, utility companies can charge a maximum of one year back for unpaid utilities.
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