HARRISBURG, Pa. - PPL Electric Utilities and the state Public Utility Commission have come to terms on a proposed settlement over PPL’s widespread overbilling of customers.
Under the terms of the settlement, the Allentown-based utility company will pay a $1 million civil penalty and enact a series of corrective actions in response to the issues that affected thousands.
Besides the civil penalty, according to the terms, PPL has voluntarily agreed to absorb another $16 million in additional costs related to rectifying the billing issues.
The bills were based on “estimated” electricity usage, not actual use, and in some cases resulted in charges hundreds of dollars higher than normal. Additionally, the PUC said, thousands of PPL accounts received no bills for one or several months.
PPL's response
The PUC announced the proposed settlement Wednesday and submitted it for review and consideration by PUC commissioners, who will make a final determination.
The settlement was proposed by PPL and the PUC’s independent Bureau of Investigation and Enforcement.
In a statement, PPL Electric Utilities said supporting its customers and continuously improving its service are top priorities.
"We hope the Commission will approve the proposed joint settlement, the elements of which build upon the significant changes we already have made to PPL Electric Utilities’ processes and systems over the past year to prevent a billing issue like this from happening again," said PPL spokesperson Dana Burns.
The $16 million in additional costs beyond the civil penalty include:
- About $2.3 million in voluntarily waived late fees;
- About $7.8 million of additional bad debt expense arising out of the voluntary service termination moratorium;
- Forgoing collection of approximately $1.7 million from customers who were underbilled in the estimation true-up process;
- An additional approximately $3.7 million of unplanned costs in engaging external vendors;
- And about $700,000 of unbudgeted employee overtime expenses.
Under the settlement, PPL agrees not to seek to recover any of those costs in future rate cases “or in any other manner,” according to the PUC.
The PUC said it launched an investigation early this year. A PUC news release said the investigation centered on "billing issues impacting PPL customers in response to large numbers of consumer calls and complaints about unusually high or low estimated bills, missing monthly bills, and the lack of adequate customer service support resulting in consumers being unable to reach PPL Call Center representatives to discuss their billing concerns."
The scope of the problems
The PUC said billing issues began in December 2022, when PPL discovered its customer meter data was not transferring from the utility’s meter data management software to its customer service system.
"The inability to transfer actual meter data backed up normal customer billing operations and resulted in sending estimated December 2022 bills," the PUC said. "Later, human error caused additional incorrect bills to be issued, while some customers received no bills, and issues with bill estimation resulted in wildly inaccurate bills."
The PUC provided these figures in its settlement announcement:
- More than 48,000 PPL accounts received no bills during one or more months between December 2022 and April 2023;
- More than 91,000 unique PPL accounts received no bills during that same time period;
- From December 2022 to January 2023, nearly 795,000 estimated bills were issued by PPL, and 65,000 more were issued between February and May;
- An analysis of estimated bills by PPL revealed that 67% (261,104 customers) had an estimate differing from the customers’ actual usage of 10% or greater. A third of them differed by more than 25%, and nearly 48,000 bills were based on an estimate that differed from actual usage by more than 50%.
- Call center data from January through April showed that 41% of calls to PPL were abandoned without customers being able to reach a representative. Those who did get through faced "extremely long wait lines."
Additionally, the PUC said, more than 82,000 estimated bills were affected by missing or inaccurate supply charges. That resulted in a process in which PPL canceled the initial estimated bills and rebilled accounts to correct the errors, creating consumer confusion and complications that took months to fix.
