Ofgem: SSE to Pay GBP1 Million After Inaccurate Yearly Statements
07 June 2018 - 5:12PM
Dow Jones News
By Maryam Cockar
U.K. energy watchdog Ofgem said Thursday that SSE PLC (SSE.LN)
will pay 1 million pounds ($1.3 million) to the body's
consumer-redress fund after providing some prepayment meter
customers with inaccurate and misleading information in yearly
statements.
The U.K. Office of Gas & Electricity Markets said it
launched an investigation into the energy supplier in November 2017
after SSE reported the issue to the regulator.
Ofgem said that its investigation found that between June 2014
and September 2015 SSE sent out 1.15 million yearly statements to
580,000 of its U.K. prepayment meter customers.
"Due to an IT coding error, these annual statements had
inaccurate information on the alternative cheaper tariff available
to customers and inaccurate estimates of how much they could save
annually by switching to them," Ofgem said.
"Some statements also overestimated the annual savings the
customers could make by changing their prepayment meter to a
standard credit meter paying by direct debit, as well as by moving
to paperless billing".
Ofgem said that the level of harm by SEE's incorrect statements
is low as only a small proportion of customers would have acted on
the information by switching, and that the average saving for each
customer would have been low.
The regulator said SSE has since improved its processes to
prevent incorrect statements being issued again.
Write to Maryam Cockar at maryam.cockar@dowjones.com
(END) Dow Jones Newswires
June 07, 2018 02:57 ET (06:57 GMT)
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