Utility Billing Update

On May 13th the Town Council got an interim report from the 3rd Party (BarryDunn) reviewing our utility billing in the wake of the cyber security incident last year. This is what we learned.

3rd Party Review of Utility Billing

Key Take Away: BerryDunn concluded that Apex, in aggregate, under-billed customers last year in the wake of the cyber security incident by around $300,000. That means, on average, each customer’s bill was about $10 lower than it should have been. Read more here

We received an update from our 3rd Party Reviewer (slides), BerryDunn. BerryDunn is a national award winning accounting firm, specializing in utilities (among other things). FAQ

They have finished a complete system simulation of the utility bills for the months in question and performed spot checks during the months before and after. This complete simulation, which was run on all accounts, showed that the Apex Utilities under-billed, in aggregate, by around $300,000 during this period.

With the simulation complete and results reported, they then were asked by the town to “review in detail” 100 accounts to calculate how much each account was over or under. 99 of those accounts were under-billed, 1 was over-billed.

The review of the 100 accounts was not their entire process. It was not the “simulation” they spoke of that was used to draw their conclusions - it was additional review, done after the simulation, at the request of the town, in response to the results. The in depth review was not the process used to calculate $300,000 in under-billing.

They note that the major source of the under-billing was missing base charges due to multi-month bills. My understanding is our software doesn’t support multiple base charges in a single billing cycle. A migration to new software is already in progress.

With that caveat, BerryDunn’s report thus demonstrates the utility bills issued last year were generally correct, albeit for an unexpectedly long billing period (and thus for a larger amount) due to the cyber security incident.

From BerryDunn’s presentation

Next Steps

My understanding is BerryDunn will be issuing a report soon which will be more comprehensive than the presentation we got on Tuesday. I’ll share it when I receive it.

Apex is legally obligated to collect utility bills. We can not waive them or reduce them. We must collect past balances. Additionally, if we know that you were under-billed by $10, or $20, or $100 - we are required to then true up the account by adding the missing charge. So, it is in your interest for us to not know for certain you were under-billed.

Given that, the Apex Town Council gave direction to not immediately recalculate everyone’s bill (i.e. do the full “review in detail” for everyone), as doing so would have likely triggered extra charges on everyone’s bill. Instead, the Council directed staff to create a process where a utility customer can choose to have their bill recalculated by BerryDunn. My understanding is there soon will be an online form published to that end.

I want to stress that you probably do not want to do this. The recalculated bill will likely be higher than the bill you received, because they are properly applying base charges that we initially did not.

The Town has updated their 3rd Party Review page with all of this information and more.

For what it’s worth I voted against this motion, and it passed 4-1. My preference would have been for us to just receive this report and process it for a few days, ask more questions, perhaps brainstorm other approaches, before deciding on a direction forward. I am not saying the direction we went in is necessarily wrong or bad: I am just saying that in the moment, having just received the presentation and as I was still digesting it, I was immediately being asked to vote on direction. So I voted no. I saw no need to immediately act. It has been 10 months since the cyber security incident required us to take down and rebuild our utility billing software server, another week or two to contemplate our next move wouldn’t have mattered.

So that’s that.

-terry