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Issued: April 2003

SUMMARY

This report presents findings and recommendations from our follow-up audit of recommendations made in January 2002 by McConnell Jones Lanier & Murphy (MJLM), concerning Austin Energy’s Account Collections.

In the year since MJLM made their 39 recommendations, Austin Energy has made progress implementing improvements and continues work to make further changes. These improvements fall into four categories: credit and collection processes, technology implementation, consumption control, and credit and collections policy.

Credit and Collection Processes

When reviewing one recommendation, we identified discrepancies in a vendor’s invoice that led to a recovery of approximately $270,000. We also found that AE has:

• Reduced the number of days between when an account becomes delinquent and when it is referred to the collection agency,
• Implemented several Citywide initiatives that should have an impact on reducing delinquent accounts in the seven highly delinquent zip codes in addition to the rest of the City, and
• Corrected a query error thereby abolishing the practice of sending delinquency notices to inactive accounts with insignificant balances.

We found that AE has:

• Implemented the use of LexisNexis to confirm customer identities and prevent false identification numbers from being used when creating new customer accounts,
• Run queries to match inactive accounts to active accounts, although research efforts to link possible matches is progressing slowly, and
• Made some technology improvements while further analyzing major system enhancements.

Consumption Control

• AE has undertaken efforts to improve detection of meter tampering and current diversion.

Credit and Collection Policy

• AE has drafted proposed changes to the Utility Service Regulations that would place more stringent requirements on customers wishing to reconnect service.

Click here to go to our audit request form to request a hard copy of this report (Report No. AU03313) or download the entire text of the Austin Energy Account Collections audit report (Size: 272 KB) in Adobe Acrobat. You will need Adobe's Acrobat Reader to view these files.

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