By Takudzwa Pongweni- Daily Maverick
On Wednesday evening, JoburgCAN, Outa, and Schindlers Attorneys hosted a webinar to guide consumers through the process of effectively disputing and rectifying municipal billing discrepancies.
“My municipal bills skyrocketed, and it is inaccurate. The question is, what can I do now?”
Understanding the basics
Wood said charges found on a municipal bill would not always appear on every single account because it depends if it is a tenant account, an owner account, what kind of property you have, or what services you are using on the property.
Rates, also known as taxes, are paid by all property owners and are based on the market value of your property and prescribe after 30 years.
Refuse charges are for the municipality to provide refuse removal and city cleaning charges across the municipality as a whole, while sewer charges are for the ability to connect to the municipal sewer system.
“Most people think that these are services that a municipality provides and that they have a choice whether to pay for those charges or not. But in terms of the law, these types of charges are taxes, which means you have to pay them — and it’s not based on whether you get any services back for those,” she said.
Water and electricity are different types of charges.
“These are what we call fees. These are your classic services where you only pay when you consume and you pay for what you consume,” she said.
Wood explained tariffs as a municipality menu, with each municipality determining its tariffs.
The rights and responsibilities of municipalities and consumers
Wood said municipalities are obliged by law to provide services to people who live within its jurisdiction and to collect the amount that they charge consumers for those services.
A municipality is given significant empowerment by the law to collect the charges that it bills people. However, municipalities at the moment are only using a fraction of their power — which creates a ‘massive problem in South Africa’, said Wood.
“Unfortunately, they only like two or three of these mechanisms and so they’re not collecting everything they need to,” she said.
If municipalities do not have the money they need, this renders them unable to provide services to the people in their jurisdictions.
“Then you get things like potholes, water services failing, and electricity maintenance not being done, and so forth,” said Wood.
Consumers are obliged by law to make payments of the charges that are due to the municipality. Wood said this was simpler to do when an individual has received their bill with no errors and there is no dispute.
What is a dispute?
“A dispute is you explaining to the municipality on reasonable grounds why you think the bill is wrong,” said Wood.
One can dispute a municipal bill, an estimated bill, and your property rates — although these disputes should be directed to the valuation department at a municipality.
Wood said that the word ‘dispute’ comes from Section 102 of the Municipal Systems Act and it was important to provide the municipality with proof and information that there is something wrong with your bill.
“To raise a dispute, you have to follow the procedures that the municipality has written down in its internal policy documents and bylaws,” said Wood.
Every municipality can make its laws — which are known as bylaws and should be available on their website. Every municipality can also make policies, that set out rules for certain things.
“You might have a policy for water chargers specifically for indigent households, you might have an electricity policy for residential consumers or industrial consumers,” said Wood.
The most common reason for disputing a municipal bill is if there is something wrong with the charge that is on the invoice and this is typically with more expensive items on one’s bill, said Wood.
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These items are often electricity, followed by water, and then property rates. Sewer and refuse and not typically significant charges.
“Although in the commercial context, your sewer sewer charge can be very, very big, if not even sometimes more than your water. So on the commercial side, you’re mainly going to be fighting electricity, water, and sewer, and then rates come later,” she said.
Wood said that there were a multitude of reasons why your bill could be incorrect.
One of the most common reasons is electricity problems, an example of this is the meter number on your bill not matching the meter number at your house.
The second most common is a water problem which could have been caused by theft, a leak, or the municipality guessing — which Wood said, unfortunately, happened often.
“So when a municipality doesn’t actually take readings of your meter, for quite a long time, what it does is it guesses how much you’ve been using, and it puts the guess on the bill,” she said.
“Later on, it then goes and takes an actual reading and now it knows how much you’ve actually used, and it turns out that how much you’ve used there’s quite a lot more than the guesses that they had previously put on your bill”.
This results in you receiving one large bill for one month, which should have been spread out over a much longer period in the past, said Wood.
Smaller municipalities don’t usually have issues with property rates, but the big metropolitan municipalities do — with the common issue being the municipal valuation that is used to calculate the rate.
“So they [the municipality] say your property is worth R2-million when you think it’s only worth R1-million so they will be charging you double the property rates that you think you should pay,” she said.
Wood said while these are the most common reasons that one could have a dispute, these were just the tip of the iceberg.
The dispute process
Wood said some municipalities had documents that spell out what the dispute resolution procedure is, although this procedure has a standard methodology to some degree, it differs from one to the next. This information is usually on a municipal website, but if not one can go in person to their local municipality and ask.
“Joburg, for example, your first step to logging a dispute is to find the call centre and log a query with them telephonically. If that doesn’t work, after how many days it says then you have to escalate it to the next level which is a written letter of complaint. If that doesn’t work, then the last step will be escalation to the municipal manager where you file an appeal,” she said.
Section 62 of the Local Government Municipal Systems Act gives consumers the right to go and deliver to the municipal manager proof of their disputes and file it in an appeal. The municipal manager becomes responsible for resolving the dispute.
If you are in Cape Town or Johannesburg and filing an appeal with the municipality manager does not resolve the issue, you can go to the Ombud. If this does not work, you can approach a court for assistance, said Wood.
“If you have, as a consumer declared a dispute with a municipality, about the amount of money that’s owned on your bill, then the municipality is not allowed to take credit control measures against you,” said she said.
Credit control measures include:
- The disconnection of your supply of electricity or water to your property — which is the most common measure.
- Municipalities involving credit controllers who work internally or outsourcing debt collectors.
- In very rare instances, municipalities will issue summons.
Wood said that because of section 102 [of the Local Government: Municipal Systems Act], there is something called the consolidation of accounts.
“That means your municipal account for your property is like a giant potjie pot, all of your services, whether it’s electricity, or water, or sewer, or refuse, or any other charge that you get on your municipal bill, the municipality can cut off your electricity if you haven’t paid any of your charges,” she said.
A common mistake people make is thinking that only your electricity bill will be cut if your electricity is not paid but all your other charges are paid — which is not true.
“You can have one service cut off for nonpayment of another, so you can even have both of your services cut off if you haven’t paid your rates because it’s all one giant melting pot, and all of the accounts are consolidated,” said Wood.
“The most important thing to remember here is to document absolutely every interaction with every municipal official in a detailed manner, as best as you can”.
How you can safeguard yourself
Kleynhans and Wood both encouraged consumers to take proactive steps to be able to prevent disputes in the future.
Some of these steps include:
- Actively monitoring your bills;
- Checking if there is a water leak underground, or if the metre is running permanently in your property;
- Gathering as much evidence as possible; and
- Following the correct dispute process.
“One of these things is to keep a very meticulous paper record of absolutely every interaction that you have with a municipality because you need proof that you have followed that procedure before you can escalate it to the next one,” said Wood. DM