Duke Energy admitted that the root cause of the problem was a coding error that occurred when customers opted to pay their monthly utility bills via the utility’s Budget Billing or Percentage of Income Payment Plan Plus (in Ohio only). A company spokesperson told Bloomberg BusinessWeek that while customers were sent the correct invoices and their on-time payments were properly credited, the billing system indicated that the customers’ bills were paid late.
As a result, that late payment information for residential customers was sent by formal agreement to the National Consumer Telecom & Utilities Exchange (NCTUE). The NCTUE is a consortium of over 70 member companies from the telecommunications, utilities and pay TV industries that serves as a credit data exchange service for its members. Holding over 325 million consumer records, NCTUE provides information to its members regarding the credit risk of their current and potential customers. For non-residential customers, the “late payment” snafu had worse consequences: the delinquency reports were sent to the business credit rating agencies Dun & Bradstreet and Equifax Commercial Services.
Duke Energy’s press release said that the company “deeply regretted” the error that has effectively trashed the credit scores of hundreds of thousands of its residential and business customers for years. The utility says the erroneous information has now been “blocked” for use by the NCTUE, Dun & Bradstreet and Equifax, and it has dropped its membership in all three.
The press release mentioned that the company is still investigating whether additional customers who had “unique” billing circumstances were affected by the coding error.
But what the written statement failed to mention is that the utility found the error only after a former customer discovered that she was having trouble setting up service at another NCTUE utility member because of a supposedly poor payment history at Duke Energy. After contacting Duke Energy and asking why she was being shown as a delinquent bill payer when she was not, the utility realized that the woman’s erroneous credit information was only the tip of a very large IT oofta iceberg.
While Duke Energy claims that “we take responsibility” for the error, it is being rather quiet about explaining what exactly “taking responsibility” means for the hundreds of thousands of customers who may have been unjustly financially affected by the erroneous information sent to the three credit agencies over the past four years. It wouldn’t surprise me to see a class action lawsuit filed against Duke Energy in the near future to help the company gain greater clarity on what its responsibility is.
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