The City of Bloomington is working to address a utility billing issue that resulted in some customers paying more than they should have.
Finance Director Scott Rathbun says the problem arose during a recent computer system upgrade, resulting in some “redundant” usage data being combined with current information in the online billing portal.
“We're still looking into it completely, but from what I understand from IT is we had an upgrade, and the naming convention for the files was changed slightly, so the transfer program thought the old files were new files and included them,” Rathbun said.
He said accounts in the first of the city’s four billing cycles registered for auto-pay service had the higher balances withdrawn from their financial accounts.
“It was discovered pretty much immediately,” Rathbun said, estimating between 2,000-3,000 customers were affected. “We had residents reaching out to us, so it's been all hands on deck.”
Rathbun said Bloomington is refunding the incorrect payments, and after the refunds are processed the affected utility accounts will withdraw the proper amounts. He said customers using credit or debit cards to make the payments will see their refunds processed sooner than those who pay with online checking.
“One other complication that occur[ed is] these payments for this billing cycle were from a billing cycle that occurred a month ago,” he said. “Now that same billing cycle is ready to have new bills produced. So we're having to kind of wait before we post that new bill to the portal until all these corrections occur.”
Rathbun said it's hard to put a dollar figure on the average amount of the discrepancies because some of the accounts are residential and some are commercial. He said he was aware of one customer who paid almost $600 when the actual current amount due was closer to $100.
“We are obviously very sorry for the inconvenience to our residents and to the community,” he said, noting the city is working with customers to reimburse those who received an overdraft fee from their bank. “We're trying to do everything we can to address it, and that also includes addressing how to not have this occur again.”
