Johannesburg - Tough action will be taken against those City of Johannesburg employees who are found to be responsible for the "grossly exaggerated bills" issued to residents and businesses in the city.
City of Johannesburg Mayor Amos Masondo said those responsible for the "inexplicable errors" that resulted in the inflated bills would be held accountable for poor performance, negligence and malicious intent.
"The city will not tolerate mediocrity and poor performance in serving the public," Masondo said, during a media briefing on Wednesday.
This follows numerous complaints by residents who received incorrect municipal bills recently. Earlier this week, Cooperative Governance and Traditional Affairs Minister Sicelo Shiceka met with the city in a bid to sort out the problem.
Although the number of those who received the inflated bills was minimal, according to the mayor, the issue would receive special attention.
He added that the city had implemented a number of initiatives to improve services to the public, with the focus on customer service, billing and credit control. One such initiative - Programme Phakama - was implemented in August last year.
He said the main objectives of Programme Phakama were to:
* have a single service utility (for managing the revenue value chain)
* be responsible for the overall revenue and customer services
* operate from a single common data base and
* use a single IT system robust enough to run the operations of the city.
In the implementation of the programme, data had to be migrated from multiple sources such as Joburg Water, City Power, Pikitup and other city departments.
The mayor explained that inconsistencies in the migrated data were identified and that some accounts could not be processed until those inconsistencies were resolved.
With the implementation of the IT projects came "glitches" and challenges, said Masondo. Some of these challenges affected property transfers, clearances and refunds, some resulted in balances on the cut-offs and accounts statements not corresponding, while in some cases, the consumption data and the billed amount did not correspond.
Masondo said with the help of experts, the city was finding solutions to these and other challenges.
"As from 1 July 2010, when we completed migration, we were only able to bill 744 852 customers. Through our data cleansing efforts, we have progressively been able to increase the number of customers billed to 1 040 648," he added.
The city issued 13 404 residents with final notices for unpaid accounts in December last year. The services of 8 333 of these residents, who owed the city R320 million, were cut off.
