Scottish Power: "Billing chaos caused by a new IT system" | Hacker News Reader

Scottish Power: "Billing chaos caused by a new IT system"

theguardian.com

If I were in this position, I would:

1. Send a clear letter outlining you are not a customer to head office by registered post.

2. Then do nothing at all.

If they eventually send bailiffs, or hit your credit record, take them to small claims court. By notifying them in a registered letter, you will satisfy the court that you took steps to rectify their mistake, and should get a decent payout for your troubles. Do not take it to the energy ombudsman - they tend to be powerless to actually do much apart from make statements about things.

"The calls pursued him to his wife’s hospital bedside where she was being treated for cancer."

Also, it's not easy to ignore someone who's threatening you with law enforcement. Because they're threatening you with law enforcement.

Who are? There isn't any mention of law enforcement in the article.

Think there’s some confusion between American/British English meaning of the word “bailiff”

I might just do that

I moved to Scotland 2 years ago. After one year I switched providers away from Scottish Power. They sent me a final bill (snail mail) for £0.05, but their internet and phone payment systems kept breaking on me. When I finally got through to a human they told me “our system can’t accept such low payments”.

They forgave the amount. Weeks later I got another snail mail letter saying I was £0.04 in credit.

Every interaction I had with them was farcical - I wouldn’t touch them with a 10ft pole.

I had them when I lived in London, 15 years ago.

Our electric meter ticked over from 99999kWh to 0. You’d think that this happens fairly often.

Well, Scottish power had never heard of such a thing, told me that meters “didn’t run out of numbers”, and that the bill for £12,000 for my power use this month was correct. They’d billed for 100,000 kWH in a month - never mind that I’d have had to be burning 134kW nonstop, on a 5kW domestic circuit.

They sent bailiffs - we told them to come back with police.

The police came - expecting a cannabis factory. Searched the apartment, the loft, broke some stuff, left the white carpets brown, left.

My flatmates were, at this point, losing their minds. One of them is a criminal barrister, and this whole situation could destroy her career.

So she goes to her head of chambers, a well respected QC, and explains the situation, as she’s worried that the police are going to call him about “the cannabis factory”.

He finds the whole thing outrageous - writes a forceful letter to each of Scottish power and Hammersmith & Fulham police.

And that was that.

If I hadn’t been living with a barrister, I’d probably be in prison now, for stealing non-existent electricity to grow non-existent drugs.

Surely a judge would have thrown this out? Had you consulted a lawyer for the damages? Or at the minimum, a cease and desist letter for the harrassment?

I had a water meter mismatch screwup some years ago.

I'd get a bill, go check my meter, reading doesn't match, call them up, you have this wrong, send an engineer to ensure you fix it. Engineer comes, yup, this is the wrong meter, wait a month, rinse and repeat.

After a few iterations I had my bank unwind the bill payments. "I will pay you when you bill me correctly, and not before".

Eventually they phoned me. They'd tried to fix the account and it was impossible so their new plan was to discard the old account with the incorrect bills entirely, set me up a new account with the right meter, was that OK?

A while later I got lawyer letters saying the supplier would sue me over the debt from the old account unless I paid. I did them the courtesy of phoning. They said those letters are automatic and they had no intention of actually trying to recover the money - and I heard nothing more about it.

So basically I got a few months of free water for my trouble. Not great, but not awful.

Yeah, most of those systems have an automated dunning system built in.

IT doesn't exist in a vacuum. This sounds like bad business practices are causing the billing chaos.

This. I was a Scottish Power customer about six years ago when they were censured for fucking up a great many customer's bills, mine included. They have been failing at billing for a long time.

I think there's a much deeper problem at Scottish Power than just IT systems. I spent close to a year trying to get them to fix an incorrect bill and nobody I talked to had any idea what to do (probably 6 or 7 people across various departments).

I know many others who have had similar problems with Scottish Power, and I'm sure there will be more testimonies in other comments.

The question on my mind is how does a company resolve such deep-rooted institutional failings?

Sounds to me more like Scottish Power is a scam run by the mob. Not entirely sure of the law in Scotland but I would publicize this theory and see if SP files a lawsuit which would open them to discovery.

Reminds me of a similar story out of the UK where the postal service IT systems were supposedly losing accounting info and getting contractors into legal trouble: https://www.cbronline.com/news/horizon-it-system-errors-sent...

This is an enormous scandal and, in my opinion, calls into question the nature of the legal system itself. The law is clearly biased towards assuming the establishment is being truthful and accurate, and trying to prove otherwise is an uphill battle.

I can't help but agree. In both of these cases the court should have essentially frozen the companies' ability to pursue any debts at all in the courts until they remedied their obvious internal problems. As is, the consequences of these errors is sickeningly one-sided.

It seems like there is some blame with the ombudsman who will only take complaints for people who have already gone through a non-functional complaints process.

The idea of an ombudsman is to have a human point of contact when the machine of bureaucracy has become wholly unreasonable. Adding bureaucratic barriers in front of the ombudsman kind of defeats their purpose.

Just a note: Scottish Power is owned by Iberdrola, the Spanish multi-national utility. Iberdrola has Avangrid as a listed subsidiary in the US, operating under different brands.

As one of the biggest utilities in the world, this is pretty inexcusable!

I live in Maine. The State way up there in the corner of the states... Search for articles on 'billing issues' from our (largest) power company, Central Maine Power.... (It has been a pretty large deal for almost a few years now; Major cluster*)

Any guesses who they were somewhat-recently bought out by? Yup. You guessed correctly.

I'm not sure these are issues; I believe it's how this terrible company just tries to make more money.

I'm really confused by the title as posted here. It seems to have almost nothing to do with the article. It's a cherry pick of a single sentence from the article that talks about a prior incident. Not the current one the article is talking about.

The full title was too long and did not convey the relevance of the article to HN. From my reading, I understand that Scottish Power is still using the IT system mentioned in the quote I re-purposed as a title. According to Gerald Slater, quoted in the article, that IT system is the reason behind its false billing of non-customers:

>> They are calling my good name into question and, at the very least, should change their chaotic systems to ensure my treatment does not happen to anyone else.

ScottishPower (its all one word in their name) are a nightmare. They pulled the same shit as Enron did (turning off generation at peak times to drive up the price to turn back on the same generation). As recently as 2015 they were banned from taking on new retail customers because they ignored too many regulator instructions, broke rules and were generally shit at customer services. They're notorious for unlawful cold calling, aggressive sales techniques and billing randomly. They set the bailiffs on people who are not even their customers and who went through all the correct steps to prove they owed nothing.

This seems like a larger issue with collections. How can a company be even able to send collectors to people they have no business relationship with (and presumably can’t produce any documentation towards that effect).

Easily... it's just a contract - anyone can contract a debt collector.

A reasonably one would require proof including the original contract, but, big companies like this are so automated, they have their processes down to an art.

It will pretty much be an export of unpaid debt gets sent to a collection agency. The collection agency will try to hound people as much as possible to pay.

People who don't pay may get taken to court and the debt collectors will either win by default, or, the person will show up, say they haven't been a customer and win with ease.

Also, any reasonable debt company would drop immediately upon sending proof, but, so do a lot of liars, so it's a hard one, but the law is on the customer's side.

In the UK collecting personal debt (from individuals not companies) requires a license which you'll lose if you harass people. No doorstepping, no calling employers or family, no 2am calls, nothing like that is permitted.

You maybe won't even need to show up for this bogus nonsense in court. If they've any sense lawyers for a firm that's clearly got a paperwork muddle will cancel the case, because unlike you if they show up with crap the judge may throw the book at them. As officers of the court they have a duty here which a lay person doesn't have to get all their paperwork straight. If they show up and the judge says well this seems like it's not even your customer - they may be in some real trouble. "The computer says" won't work on a judge.

This is just how they roll in the UK. Nobody has a clue what they are doing, or even cares

I've had one of these letters, 600 quid they wanted for my neighbours electric, addresses to the owner occupier. never had a Scottish power account and it's nothing to do with me.

I called them, but we shall see if that stops them.

Sounds like the IT system correctly automated and accelerated the customer’s process.

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