City sets up billing escalation team

Wednesday, 22 February 2012 00:00 Written by Nicola Mawson
The city of Johannesburg is setting up a team that will deal with billing queries escalated by councillors, which will be in place by the end of this month.

Thousands of residents were affected by billing problems when the city started moving its disparate legacy systems onto a platform, through a project code-named Phakama, in November 2009.

Last November, the city unveiled a revenue and billing roadmap, which aims to fill all the gaps and correct all the flaws with its problematic systems over a period of 19 months.

councillor Linus Muller, co-ordinator of the party’s billing assistance team, says it has been assisting more than 1 000 rate payers with billing and revenue queries over the last few months. He says the team has been escalating queries on behalf of residents and businesses.

However, finance MMC Geoffrey Makhubo has now requested that this practice stops, says Muller. Makhubo’s team is putting together a group to assist with councillor-related queries, which will be in place by the end of the month, he adds.

Residents will be required to follow up with the city at least three times before billing issues can be escalated, Muller says. At the end of last month, there were 109 000 queries in its system, 56 000 of which relate to revenue.