adminInnocent Ruwende Municipal Reporter
SOME Harare City Council employees are reportedly manipulating loopholes in the city’s billing system to swindle unsuspecting residents of thousands of dollars, threatening to reverse the gains of Government’s e chicanery involves the issuing of fake receipts and making residents pay for their accounts to be credited.
In some cases, the workers would reportedly copy information from the BIQ system and place it on their personal laptops because the system has a loophole of auto credit or debit and they could tamper with the information and credit consumers with approximately US$5 000 before approaching them for a bribe.
Harare Residents Trust committees officer Ms Pretty Chabuda said most residents complaining of high bills were from Mbare and Glen Norah.
Residents also voiced concern over estimate-based bills. Council’s business development director Mr Cosmas Zvikaramba confirmed that some council employees had devised ways of swindling the council and residents, and said measures had since been put in place to stop this.
“What we have done internally is to come up with new receipts with added security features and we have ensured that only machines recognised on the council system can access the system.
“We have also removed the functionality of the auto credit system and we have authorised a limited number of people to use journal vouchers as a way of mitigating the criminal activities,” he said.
Ms Chabuda accused personnel from the City Treasurer’s Department of scanning and issuing fake receipts to consumers.
“It became difficult for the loss control section to detect the culprit as the hacker used to hack the password of a worker who would be on leave and sign in.
This was disadvantageous to the consumer as his/her account will not be credited and only got to realise it three weeks later,” she said.
The association said it was shocking that in just two months after the debt write-off, the City of Harare is sending out shocking bills showing water consumption at US$65 in most households in Budiriro despite dysfunctional water meters.
Ms Chabuda said the workers in question also used a journal voucher — a complete reversal book entry which they manipulated through reversal of charges that could have been found out if the consumer had been overcharged as a result of human error like meter reading or data capturing and authorities were then asked to do complete reversal to rectify the challenges.
This, she said, prejudiced the city and benefited individuals. She said that the billing is structured in a way that does auto credit interest 10 percent on overdue accounts which means even if a consumer settled for a payment plan the money was being taken up with accrued interests discouraging the consumer to clear debt accrued.
“The residents are scared that sooner than expected the bills will skyrocket if council continues to bill consumers using estimation. Residents are not aware of the extra 0.75cents that they are charged on residential sewage and an extra 0.98 cents on refuse collection charge in high densities,” she said.
Mr Zvikaramba said the 10 percent interest which residents were paying was a statutory requirement and council was mandated to charge 1 percent interest above interest rate on Government loans.
He said residents who were querying their bills should visit council offices. On the issue of bills based on estimates, Mr Zvikaramba said 50 percent of the city’s water meters were not working hence they have to calculate bills based on estimates.
‘We calculate the average of the last six months when the metre was working,” he said.
He urged residents to pay their bills at council offices or through platforms such as Ecocash.
Online Reporter