PSE errors may mean surprise bill for you

As many as 5,000 Puget Sound Energy customers could be in for an unpleasant surprise over the next several months as the utility struggles to catch up with a backlog of possible errors in natural-gas bills dating to before 2006. In some cases, the amount owed can reach thousands of dollars.

PSE hasn't been able to identify any single cause for the errors, said Dorothy Bracken, PSE spokeswoman.

"We've been chipping away at it," she said, and the utility is half-finished investigating 10,000 incorrect bills that had piled up by about 2006.

Don and Sandy Hatcher of Maple Valley were notified in April that they owed $2,325 in payments dating to 2005 for a gas meter that wasn't registering correctly, even though they'd been paying their bills during all that time.

PSE later offered to reduce the payment to $1,744, cutting the amount owed by 25 percent. Bracken says such arrangements are common, and under state law, the utility will work with customers to allow them to pay over an extended period of time. Still, the Hatchers aren't very happy.

"They need a new accountant," said Don Hatcher. "I think PSE should be audited."

In the process of reviewing bills, has PSE ever refunded money to customers?

"No, I don't think so," Bracken said. The utility is looking for situations where energy was used and not paid for. In such cases, it can legally send a supplemental bill — even if the error was made by the utility.

First warning in 2004

PSE was first alerted to its billing problems in 2004, when customers began receiving unusual statements. At one point, an 85-year-old woman got a $1,900 bill for four years of use; another customer got a bill for $1,800 — the first payment request she'd received in six years.

Problem bills come to the attention of PSE through various routes. Sometimes customers receive bills showing nothing due and notify PSE. Other times, such customers don't complain, and the PSE computer eventually catches the problem. Or, as happened with the Hatchers, bills showed usage and were paid. At some point, the PSE computer identified the account as having unusually low bills, whereupon PSE checked the Hatchers' meter and found it to be faulty.

Considering the number of customers PSE serves — it issues about 1.8 million billing statements a month, including about 735,000 for natural-gas meters from Bellingham to south of Olympia — "we're not getting a huge influx of complaints," said Marilyn Meehan, information officer for the state Utilities and Transportation Commission. The UTC ensures utilities are fairly priced, and will help resolve billing disputes, though customers are advised to first contact their utility.

The number of complaints about PSE gas bills over the past few years, according to Meehan: 60 in 2006, 22 in 2007 and 54 so far this year.

Why it happens

There are a number of reasons why PSE might suspect a bill is wrong, Bracken said.

Every month there will be a small percentage of meters that break and result in incorrect bills, she said.

Even when bills are correct, they can vary month to month by enormous amounts. For example, when "snowbirds" leave for the winter, their bills plummet, as do the bills of swimming-pool owners when they stop heating their pools. There are "tens of thousands" of such customers, Bracken said.

PSE allows such accounts to fluctuate for several months to see whether they'll return to normal, she said.

A PSE computer scans all bills — there are too many to be reviewed manually — and flags accounts that truly seem inaccurate, including those showing no energy use at all, Bracken said.

By 2006, the utility had a backlog of about 10,000 such questionable accounts, she said, leading to the final step of physically reviewing the accounts and sending someone to check the meters. That's what's happening now, she said.

"We are looking into whether we're seeing some type of trend" or common cause, she said, but none has been detected.

Peyton Whitely: 206-464-2259 or pwhitely@seattletimes.com