Until the day when utility companies will voluntarily return your money when they make an error you can trust Discovery Energy to be your advocate!

Wisconsin utilities’ back bills total $6.3 million

By Ben Jones and Jeff Starck

MADISON — Faulty meters, data-entry mistakes and other problems created an unpleasant surprise last year for thousands of Wisconsin electricity customers.

The 94 electric utilities operating in the state imposed $6.3 million in back charges on nearly 7,700 Wisconsin customers, a Gannett Wisconsin Media analysis of state records found. Conversely, the utilities refunded $5.2 million in overcharges to about 2,800 customers.

The charges are perfectly legal. And in some cases, they are used to collect for stolen service.

In the industry, the charges are called “billing corrections.” But Brian Carriere of Star Prairie in northwestern Wisconsin calls them something different.

“We had kind of a nightmare,” said Carriere, who was hit with a nearly $1,000 back charge in 2009 from Northern States Power Co.

The utility told Carriere it had underestimated his bills during an eight-month span when the utility was unable to access his home’s meter.

State law allows utilities to back bill for up to two years of errors, even those caused by the utilities. Refunds can cover up to six years of mistakes. Utility officials, including those at Northern States Power, contend that the law requires them to make the corrections.

They say back-billing situations are unfortunate but sometimes unavoidable, and the state’s system for making adjustments works.

“It’s not perfect, but the electric meters aren’t perfect, either,” said Scott Meske, associate director for Municipal Electric Utilities of Wisconsin, an association representing 82 municipal-owned utilities.

“Is there a way to ensure 100 percent accuracy 100 percent of the time? Even Aaron Rodgers is inaccurate once in a while,” Meske said.

But state Sen. Mike Ellis, R-Neenah, who introduced legislation this year to end back billing, said Gannett Wisconsin Media’s findings demonstrate that problems happen too often.

“It means that they don’t have a very efficient, test-worthy system,” Ellis said. “If they have got that many over- and undercharges, that seems to me to be a lot. In this era of technology, they ought to be able to come up with a process to identify how much they are selling to the customer. And they ought to be able to do that without 11,000 mistakes.”

While the largest utilities all issued charges and refunds during 2010, many smaller utilities did not. Twenty-seven of them reported they had no billing adjustments, records show.

Wisconsin Public Service Corp., central Wisconsin’s largest electric utility, with about 500,000 customers, issued $652,528 in refunds to 363 customers and back-billed 884 customers for a total of $541,797.

In 2011, WPSC has seen a significant reduction in both the number of customers who received refunds or were back-billed and the amount refunded or billed. About 250 customers have received a total of approximately $381,000 in refunds through the first 11 months of the year, and about 1,500 customers were back-billed a total of approximately $340,000, WPSC spokesman Kerry Spees said.

Two technology changes in the past year have led to the reductions, Spees said. WPSC now is using an automated meter reading system that notifies the company if no power is used at a home or business for 10 days, instead of 30 days under the previous system. Natural gas gauges also are now inspected annually for potential problems, Spees said.

“We have rules we have to follow, and that’s unfortunate in some cases for customers and fortunate for others,” Spees said of refunds and back-bills.

We Energies, the state’s largest utility, was responsible for the most back charges and refunds. Back charges totaling $3.5 million were imposed on 5,466 customers, and refunds also totaling $3.5 million were issued to 982 customers. Faulty meters were to blame for $1.7 million back charged to 489 customers, and $2.8 million in refunds paid to 807 customers.

Brian Manthey, a spokesman for We Energies, said billing corrections affected less than 1 percent of his utility’s 2.2 million customers last year. “It’s a very, very low percentage — and it’s pretty typical for what we’ve seen in any given year,” he said.

Manthey said the utility works to prevent problems that require billing corrections.

Computer programs flag trouble early; workers train to properly install meters; and inspection processes continue to improve.

But Manthey said meters are mechanical devices that are in constant use outdoors in a punishing climate.

“Despite that, we do get a high percentage of meters that do register accurately the amount of energy that has been used,” he said. “While, yes, it’s likely that there are going to be some cases of (back billing), we try to keep it as minimal as possible.”

When back charges are issued, We Energies works closely with customers to set up payment plans, Manthey said.

Ellis’ proposed legislation would prevent utilities from back billing individual customers or passing those costs to other customers.

“(The money) is going to come from the shareholders,” Ellis said. “And we want the shareholders to insist that their management teams have proper equipment.”

Ellis’ proposal failed to get the support of a legislative committee last month, but he plans to push for a floor vote next year.

“It’s the right thing to do,” he said.

Overestimating the value  of property taxes by the state assessor is common, and it becomes more so in a down market.  It is something psychological that when we see our property tax valuations go up, we are almost proud that our real estate is worth more, almost like we’ve made money off the assessment.  In a down market, if our property tax valuations stay the same, we are almost relieved that our property value hasn’t tanked like you read in the news.  In reality, your tax assessment doesn’t give you an accurate number of what someone would actually buy the property for.  It only gives you the number of what you are taxed on.  And that number, by law, is up for interpretation.

Likely you know more about your property than the assessor, and you definitely know more about your business than the assessor.  That is why you need to have a property tax audit done at least every 3 years.  It doesn’t cost you to have an expert look through your filings and determine if there were any overpayments and high assessment values.  We have a former property tax judge on our staff, and I guarantee you that after an audit, you will be only paying what you have to in taxes, and most likely, it won’t be what they sent you in the mail.

At Discovery Energy Utility Audits the use of collaboration software has improved productivity by 275%, as measured by work hours necessary to finish utility bill audits and implement the cost reduction measures and process refunds from the utilities.

While many of the criteria of improvement analysed in the study can be found as positive changes in our organization, maybe the biggest benefit of the use of collaboration software has been on corporate culture. During the process of adapting to the collaboration software Discovery Energy changed from having a “folders mindset”, where a folder is passed from one department to the next as the project progresses; to a “collaborative effort mindset”, where the roles of different departments are clear from the beginning of the project, with every team member doing their part independent of “ownership” of the project.

Click here to view the embedded video.

All it takes is a change in attitude. At least in our personal lives.

So why is it that every “green opportunity” presented in the board room has huge price tags and long break even periods? If companies want to be more in tune with the environment they need to be able to make very large financial investments, in a time when money is tight. Isn’t there a way to change the attitude and become more in tune with the environment without having to spend so much.

What about this for a corporate attitude change: Only use what you need, only pay for what you use.

It sounds simple, and this is what Discovery Energy Utility Audits does every day. Our utility audits make sure that utility costs are lowered by managing the utility provider relationships of companies that use significant amounts of electricity, natural gas, and other utilities.

Besides, we live this attitude by not charging our customers upfront for our analysis. Our customers only pay us when we find savings. We win when our customers win.

This is the attitude change that benefits the environment and the pocket book.

Check out the article:

http://www.deseretnews.com/article/700239418/2-Questar-rate-hikes-OKd.html

Even more reason to do a Utility Audit… 

Well now, I’ll be honest, we don’t find something all the time.  In fact about 3 out of 10 we won’t find any mistakes.  But since we also don’t charge anything to those 3 out of 10 either, I thought that was a funny reason not to try to find the mistakes.

But as I probed further, he said something that is just plain counter-intuitive, “I just don’t think the utility companies make that many mistakes.”

Well, I will have to beg to differ on that one.  We have made quite a nice business out of the mistakes utility companies make.  But as that customer really caught my attention, I decided to find some examples, not just our clients, of some mistakes.  Click on the links below to different stories.

http://www.upi.com/Odd_News/2010/05/15/Bill-error-catches-up-with-Texas-woman/UPI-50631273941354/

http://www.wzzm13.com/news/local/story.aspx?storyid=121299&catid=216

http://www.smdailyjournal.com/article_preview.php?id=131516&title=SmartMeter%20trouble

http://www.pressdemocrat.com/article/20100511/ARTICLES/100519877?Title=PG-E-admits-problems-with-SmartMeters

There really are too many to post.  I really like this last one about the Smart Meters not being so smart.  Anyway, I wish I would’ve had these stories when I talked with that guy.  Maybe he will read this blog and realize that the utility companies are always making mistakes.  Don’t be the sucker that just writes out the check every month without calling us to check them.  And since it doesn’t cost anything to have them audited, there really is no excuse…

However, like in anything, you pay for what you get.  So, if we do the audit, and find nothing, we charge nothing—you get nothing, we get nothing—and the work is at our cost.  And if we can recover money or lower the bills by finding errors, we will both share the savings.  It is that simple. 

And a word about how we share the savings—we only charge after our client has saved the money.  If we don’t save, again, we don’t charge.  So if a client goes out of business, moves locations, shuts down a plant, and it negates the savings because the meter is no longer being used—there are no charges from us.  As a Utility Bill consultant, we have to prove our value to our clients in order to be successful.  And the way we do that boils down to saving money.

If you are curious about what we might find on your bills, call us and talk with an auditor—you got it—for FREE!