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Update on PUC’s Audit of Utility Billing Systems and Practices
On January 16th the Rhode Island Public Utilities Commission (PUC) issued a notice of a technical session that would be held on January 22nd to review the audit of Rhode Island Energy’s billing systems and practices.
A presentation from the technical session was filed by the Guidehouse/Van Reen team and was discussed at the meeting. The presentation includes several priority recommendations:
- Assess financial impact of unbilled customers
- Assess financial impact of under-billed customers
- Assess financial impact of incorrect bills in net write-offs
- Establish choice supplier rate change controls
- Identify all customers with the incorrect supplier on bills but correct supplier in the system
- Establish controls to compare data sources between usage pulled into bills and CSS, as well as CSS and MDMS (for MV-90 accounts)
- Reassess multi-month rebilling methodology and system criteria
- Update the CSS Rate Table to individually list rate components from the tariff in CSS (opposed to combining some components)
Note: The Evaluation Team identified 20 additional lower priority recommendations in the next slides
As background, the Rhode Island PUC initiated this proceeding to conduct a comprehensive audit of Rhode Island Energy’s billing systems and practices. The basis for this inquiry is a pattern of billing anomalies that seem to primarily impact larger non-residential electric accounts, particularly those that receive net metering credits or other renewable credits.
