TABUK CITY, Kalinga – The Kalinga-Apayao Electric Cooperative (KAELCO) has stirred up a hornets’ nest after it reflected in the February 2017 bills of many of its consumers in this city what it claimed to be their accumulated arrears from as far back as 2014.
The utility compounded the sudden appearance of the alleged arrears which in some cases could be as much as five times the average monthly bills by not indicating the periods when the alleged non-payment took place and instead have thrown to the customers the burden of proof.
In advisories issued on March 15, or more than a week after the delivery of the bills, the utility urged members to visit their office for reconciliation bringing all their proofs of payment in 2015 and 2016. Consumers have been trooping to the KAELCO office daily since the second week of March.
Suspicions that non-remittance of payments, unreliable billing system, lost or incomplete data and human error may be behind the massive incidence of arrears are being fanned by instances when members were able to prove their alleged arrears do not exist.
Lawyer Debie Sallidao-Tay-og, a resident of barangay Casigayan, was told when she visited the KAELCO office that the P481.32 arrears in the family’s bill was due to non-payment of their electric consumption for January and April 2016 the combined amount of which interestingly is P5,494.69. When she produced her receipts for those months, KAELCO told her to just pay the current consumption.
The story, however, did not end there because when she asked for her customer ledger, it was found that she allegedly had not paid her November 2015 bill also. This time she could not produce the corresponding receipt.
“Assuming I was not able to pay my November 2015 bill, my arrears should appear as P2,078.26, not P481.32. The figure in my arrears is a puzzle,” Sallidao-Tay-og said.
When asked for an explanation, KAELCO spokesman Leo Ecgatan at first said that it is possible that Tay-og had a forwarded balance in 2015 but would admit in the end that the DOS-based billing system of the utility in use until January 2016 when they switched to a Windows-based system could not forward balances.
Julie Ann Manadao of the office of the Secretary of the Sangguniang Panlungsod (SP) was informed her arrearages in the amount of P6,081.74 was for the months of March and May 2016.
“When I produced my receipts for those months, they called the employees who received my payments and directed them to explain in writing how come the missing payments. KAELCO wasted my time. Good I kept my receipts because if I did not, I would have been forced to pay my bills for those months a second time,” Manadao said.
Lost or misplaced receipts are the predicament of many KAELCO consumers with alleged arrears.
Being dunned by KAELCO for P18,951.60 allegedly for five months occurring sporadically in the last three years, Geraldine Ibay of barangay Bulanao is among the thousands now beating their breasts for not taking care of their receipts. She said that along with her Internet receipts, she had placed her electric service receipts in a shoe box which got soaked during typhoon Lawin.
Ibay, however, insists that she has been paying her obligations to the utility regularly because her water refilling station could not operate without electricity. She also invoked the fact that her electric service had never been cut off since it was installed in 2013.
Ecgatan said that uninterrupted service is not proof a customer has never failed to pay his bills because, according to him, KAELCO has never been able to cope with its disconnection load mainly due to shortage of personnel and resistance from some consumers.
He informed that there are already instances when members of their disconnection crew have been threatened and actually harmed bodily.
In the case of Ferdinand Uboan, an employee of the Tabuk Farmers’ Multi-purpose Cooperative, his February 2017 bill reflected no arrears but on March 20, despite his having paid the account on March 14, KAELCO cut his service.
He was surprised when he went to KAELCO because the employee who attended to him explained the disconnection was due to non-payment of his February 2017 account. When he presented his receipt for the billing period, the employee next alleged he failed to pay his bill April last year. He also had a receipt for that month.
Uboan could not understand how come for almost a year, his payment had not yet been recorded by the utility. He also decried the inconvenience he had to go through for a non-existent obligation.
Ecgatan acknowledged that one problem is the feature of their computerized billing system where payments are automatically applied to the balance and where unpaid bills are lumped as “arrears” without indicating the period when the non-payment supposed to have taken place.
He said that they are now working on a modification of the program that will enable the breakdown of the arrears and the reflection of the specific billing periods in the bill because, according to him, “this is easier to explain and to reconcile.”
Regarding the theory of some local IT experts that the data base of the utility may not yet be complete, Ecgatan admitted that that is one possibility they are looking into for which reason their audit people are conducting physical inventory.
He said that they are in the process of inventorying their official electronic receipts, the receipts the utility was using in 2015. According to him, if the copy of the consumer has not been detached, the bill was not paid.
Ecgatan also said that since they migrated their data from the old to the new system, if there were any problems in the old, the same has been inherited by the new billing system.
Ecgatan said that their primary purpose of reflecting the arrears in the February bill was to inform the consumers of the existence of their accumulated unpaid bills.
He also said that one reason the utility did not endeavour to identify the billing periods the arrears occurred was that it would entail the use of a longer paper for the bills due to the additional space needed for the itemized arrearages which means additional expense according to him.
As of press time, 1,400 have already signed the letter asking the sanggunians of Kalinga and Tabuk City to conduct probes into the policy of the KAELCO of shifting the burden of proof to members with alleged arrears, the unreliable records and a host of other alleged wrongdoings of the utility.
KAELCO representatives and the complaining customers may just meet in the Sangguniang Panglungsod this Monday because the utility has been summoned to explain why it has not paid its business taxes in the last two years amounting to P1.9M.
The consumers pointed this out in their letter saying that an amount intended for payment of business taxes is included in the electric bills but this is not being remitted to the government.
Also on Monday, the special committee formed by Governor Jocel Baac to investigate the alleged electricity arrears of the provincial government and that of other consumers of KAELCO among other issues involving the utility will hold a public hearing.**Estanislao Albano, Jr.
