SRP Customer Bills Rounding Errors

 

 

As a consumer end user of Salt River Project's electricity utility company, I had a grievance which was brought forward to their Consumer Affairs Hearing Officer and other representatives department heads that might be able to resolve the customer grievance.

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Yolanda Martin Hearing With SRP Customer Consumer Affairs September 24, 2012

(Please visit my Facebook Page http://www.facebook.com/PTTPGRID for electricity users. )

C*O*S*T     B*I*L*L*I*N*G

Customer Oriented Service Truth

BILLING POLICY
Cost billed: multiply total KW/hrs used by published kw/hr price

My bill for July, 2012 was $200.13 and when I computed the off peak charge it was off by .02 cents more .... should have been $140.97 not $140.99 billed .... This seems like too small amount to question, but I did want to know just how the difference of 2 cents occurred?. I was using 7.88 cents kilowatt published price per kw/hr for off peak usage (EZ-3 Time of Day Usage pricing) times my 1789 total off peak kw/hrs and customer service was unable to answer why what I computed was different than what was charged. I was told it takes a billing specialist to get back to me to explain the discrepancy. I waited several days and didn’t receive an answer back as I was told to expect, so I called SRP again. Still no answer from the billing department so I asked the SRP Sr Ombudsman, Consumer Affairs, Artie Whiting, for an explanation and he said he would find out and get back to me.

It is now September 24
th and I am at this hearing today to present to you my request that the amount billed the customer always agree exactly with how a customer or SRP customer service representative would calculate cost, and to not bill an unpredictable different rounded amount of a few cents each month more or less than the actual true amount due. Presently, SRP practice is using a procedure causing monthly variable discrepancy between manually calculated amount and the SRP billed amount caused by rounding as explained by Artie who wrote: "Because of the way that SRP’s financials are audited, SRP is required to show exactly how much money it is receiving for each unbundled price per kWh. That is why they have to round each line to the nearest cent before they total the bundled charges. They cannot reflect fractions of a cent in any of the unbundled prices. They have to be exact. " This may be required for unbundled accounting, but when billing the customer SRP, I request the bill be calculated true as the published cost/kwh times total kw used. (Rounding may be required for the unbundled charges but for customer billing perhaps not round at all, but truncate resulting 4 digit dollars and cents amount to 2 decimal places to be most fair of all.) I also suggest that the most useful information of kw price be included on bills instead of the note about energy charge and environment charges adde

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(at the meeting I gave each person there a sandwich bag containing 2 pennies and a printed paragraph that read as follows:

Thank you for allowing me to present to you a billing change request (my two cents worth).  What will two cents buy? Calculating the number of watts represented by two cents: 1,000 watts/kw÷7.79 cents per kw in month of September with off peak load EZ-3 time of day pricing=128 watts x 2 cents= 256 watt/hr of electricity will power my home’s floor fan for 3 hours, or it is also the electricity wattage needed for a 22 cu ft energy efficient refrigerator running 3 hours. Two cents: all the more significant because SRP now incorrectly bills by a few pennies more than amount owed for customer’s actual kw usage monthly.  SRP has incorrectly billed the customer for years past and continues rounding error computer billing which is the cause of the discrepancy between what is actually owed and what is billed!   Customer Oriented Service Truth  (COST) billing change corrects this customer grievance problem!

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My presentation to Consumer Affairs at SRP yesterday was well received and those present were the Consumer Affairs Hearing Officer, the mana

ger of the pricing department, the supervisor of the billing department and the manager of the billing department, and the senior consumer affairs ombudsman. My friend, Diana Cameron, also attended since I had asked her to be a help to me and also a witness to the meeting since request to record was denied. The meeting lasted one and hour and was a very productive meeting. At the end of the meeting the Hearing Officer said everything that transpired was being sent to “upper management” whatever that may mean. I got the usual response from the billing supervisor who said, “It has been this way for such a long time and change is difficult”. She didn’t really get the rounding discrepancy as being a problem although others did. Change (even small changes) are hard to initiate and to implement in a large corporation (SRP is the 4th largest utility in the nation and has 950,000 customers and with 950,000 x .02 cents per customer the total discrepancy for the organization in billing those customers could be $19,000 for a month (over the last 3 years sampling 20 of my bills, I learned that 35% of my bills were not the amount if calculated price/kw multiplied by total kw). But since this particular round error is purely a random error determined by the digits represented in the many calculations of the unbundled charges that make up the bill a more realistic estimate of billing discrepancy due to round errors in their calculation would be absolute value of $7,000 monthly. It is not so much the dollar and cent discrepancy from what would be expected but the fact that accuracy (quality) in the bill is in dispute and the means by which the supervisor is now summing the rounded unbundled charges and billing the customer for that sum does not agree with the customer’s perspective of a total price/kw (bundled) x total kw used and hence off by cents which do add up to dollars in the overall customer base. What was even more dismaying was that SRP customer service, the ombudsman and others did not know how to explain the discrepancy until now two months later. Additionally they are not using Banker Rule for rounding which minimizes skewing do to rounding. Am I boring you? LOL, well then perhaps you have some insight into the “efficiency and accuracy” of mega corporations that was my primary work environment during my professional career and working life. Fortunately, I never had my nose ground down working on such minor details and had a satisfying job working on design and development of application or systems software. I asked the billing manager what language or implementation was used for their billing and he said he had no idea and doesn’t get involved in that. That may be the heart of this problem don’t you think?

How big is the elephant and what does it look like. With many fragmented multiple points of view none can see the elephant as a total image but only parts and pieces of it. I wonder who gets the rear end view? (the customer?)