5 Feb 2019
The Copperas Cove City Council received its requested Utilities Billing Audit, conducted by Weaver and Tidwell LLP. The audit covered a period from 1 April 2017 - 1 Sept 2018. Weaver and Tidwell identified approximately 14,000 individual accounts and approximately 242,000 meter reads during this period.
The procedures performed are as follows:
-Selected 150 individual accounts, allocated across seniors, residential, and commercial groups for testing.
-Compared the amount billed to the preceding and subsequent months and identified any accounts that have a variance greater than 5%.
-Recalculated the amount billed according to the fee schedule.
-Obtained the total volume amount billed and identified any variance greater than 10%.
To match the 1% requested by the City Council, they selected 141 accounts across the city to audit.
Of those 141 accounts:
-123 were residential accounts
-13 were residential-senior accounts
-5 were business accounts
None of the accounts audited showed any mis-calculations of consumption. Of the 141 accounts, 64 had variances of more than 10% from one month to another - which isn't out of the ordinary. 134 of the accounts were recalculated within .01. Of the remaining 7 that weren't, 6 were due to either a shorter/longer billing period depending on what cycle they were on or they were due to Council approved rate changes. 1 account was shown to be an error with their senior citizen discount not being fully applied. That wound up being a recurring error, and one that the auditor will be working with the city to correct for that customer. May - June showed the biggest billing variance across all the accounts due to the billing dates for that period falling on 1 June and 29 June.
In addition to the audit, Weaver and Tidwell presented some extra information that they thought could be useful to the city.
Disconnect Notices:
-None issued between April - June 2017. They believe this may have inadvertently caused problems by letting people get used to not paying their bill and not have anything to worry about. This may have started a domino effect for some customers who now struggle to get their bill paid on time.
-Issued 1-2 days past the bill due date. These notify that the disconnect will be 10 days after the notice is mailed out. (Editors note: Keep in mind - that 10 days includes any weekends if it's mailed out on a Thursday/Friday as well as holidays if the mail is down. It IS possible for you to get a disconnect notice in the mail on a Monday afternoon and have it tell you you're due for disconnect the following Tuesday.)
-No disconnects during Thanksgiving week, Christmas week, or New Years day.
High Consumption Notices:
-Received via email and phone call
-Approximately 40% of our accounts are active online. No online accounts will not receive an email disconnect notice. This presents a problem because phone calls are automated, and a lot of people instinctively do not answer automatic phone calls that come across as spam on caller ID, or they hang up as soon as they hear the automated voice.
Audit discussion by City Manager and City Council members:
-Ryan Haverlah started the conversation off by bringing up that the city did not retain a proper amount of staff to know what would be needed to work with Fathom - which was cause of a lot of the problems with accounts. This put the city in a reactive mode. Once we get our utility staffing back up, that will help us regain footing in a proactive role. However, during the issues the city has had, Fathom has been very responsive in helping city staff.
-Joann Courtland stated that this "is not enough data". Citizens are still coming forth with issues and we need to do everything we can to help them. With this audit, "we hit the bread, but we want to get to the meat" of the problem.
-Charlie Youngs would like to see the city keep the auditor on hand until the city staff gets better and can start doing in house audits. To that, the auditor replied that they could certainly do more work if needed.
-Marc Payne asked if Fathom can do any tracking of the types of problems coming in - even if it's just a paper next to each phone with general types of problems in columns, and the operator quickly puts a check in a column as it is called in.
-Dan Yancey stated the call centers don't have the time to track problem types so we need to find a different way. Jay Manning stepped in and said that 1% isn't a bad number, and that there aren't any real problems being highlighted in the audit. With the old system, a lot of times the meter reads were averaged out. Those problems that were ignored because the reading was being averaged out are now having a spotlight put on them, grabbing peoples attention via their wallets. More audits won't do any good - we should focus on our known problems for now. It is in our and Fathoms best interest to work together. For Fathom, this is even a PR issue as it won't look good for them if a city backs out due to poor service. He believes we can work together and fix all the issues going on.
-Ryan Haverlah will start categorizing and focusing on complaints, however a lot of the initial problems have been worked out.
-Fred Chavez agrees with Jay Manning's comments. He wants to compare our numbers to Fathoms as well as look at what they consider appropriate standards of customer service vs our standards.
The audit was not open for public comment, however you may comment on it at the citizens forum. With that, the discussion ended and moved on to the next agenda item.
