ECG billing anomaly: We’ve identified challenges – Minister

The challenges relating to the billing system of the Electricity Company of Ghana (ECG) have been identified and measures are being put in place to deal with those challenges, Deputy Minister of Power, John Jinapor, has said.

The state power distributor has lately been heavily criticised by the Ghanaian public over untold challenges with its billing system. The complaints forced the Public Utilities Regulatory Commission (PURC) to issue a directive to the ECG to stop using its new billing software until the billing anomaly was rectified.

The Power Ministry, as part of efforts to tackle the issue, also set up a taskforce to audit the billing system. The taskforce has finished with its work and submitted the final report and recommendations to the government.

In line with the report, Mr Jinapor revealed that President John Mahama had tasked the Ministry and the ECG to rectify the challenges by the end of this month.

“We have identified the key challenges and made recommendations to the government, based on which the president has tasked us to rectify them,” he said.

He said as part of the recommendations, “the ECG will come up with a good response time, so that if anybody has challenges, the company can work on them quickly”.

Mr Jinapor told the Daily Graphic: “The report also recommended that consumers’ bills should be submitted to them on time to avoid accumulation of bills”.

He further said the report recommended the need to increase public education on how the tariffs were calculated, so that people would know the various categories.