When I went home at lunchtime I opened the post and found one letter, apparently from Severn Trent Water and addressed to THE OCCUPIER, asking that I phone this number to “ensure credits to your account are correct”. This was a little odd as the last payment was in September last year, there was a Coventry address but a Derby phone number and an obviously cut-n-pasted signature!

I phoned the main ST Water number and went through to billing to check if this was real or a scam. Turns out it is real and because they don’t have my details they don’t know where to allocate the payments. Now we have been at this address for 3 years and ST Water were rung on our first day there to let them know that we had moved in and who we were. The guy on the phone took my details and said he would set up my details on the account.

Sorted, or so I thought.

Now for the killer blow.

“Mr Baker, we will now invoice you for all the water bills since 2006 and all you have to do is send proof of payment for all the bills and we will credit your account from the ‘THE OCCUPIER’ account.”

So I am being asked to sort through 3 years of paperwork to find 6 payments so I can avoid paying AGAIN for my water! I have found the 2008 ones as I paid via on-line banking but the other 4? Who knows….guess I know how I am wasting my day off tomrrow sifting bank statements, cheque book stubs and utility bills.

c**ts

SSP

Their problem, tell them to sort it out.

Or bill them for your time.

If they have no proof you’ve paid, but you can demonstrate payments were made during 2008, I’d say the onus is on them so sort their records out for anything pre-2008

I am going to ring up the billing dpt and ask for a statement at the property from April ’06. I will have the paper bills which I write “Paid (date)” on when I do them.

Might be a bit busy tomorrow as I have an interview too 🙂

SSP

Might be a bit busy tomorrow as I have an interview too

Good luck!

just ask them to provide copies of all bills, and payment dates to give you an approximate idea, then just wander into your bank and ask them to look up payment amounts of…etc.

Alternatively just tell them to **** off, they’re the ones that have buggered it up. Ask them what reconciliations they have, as you know you have paid, so there should be credit balances in their system which they haven’t reconciled correctly. Then ask them about their accounting policies, and whether they, on the basis of what you’ve said, believe that their accounting policies are correctly disclosed.

Then tell them to **** off again, and to stop wasting your time, and that any time undertaken by you will be billed at an hourly rate of £48 per hour, commensurate with your employment rate.

billed at an hourly rate of £48 per hour, commensurate with your employment rate.

If only I was on £48 p/h I would employ some one to do it for me 🙂 I am pretty sure that they can sort it out if they want but are too damn lazy or stupid. I might wait for the red letter and then sugest that they take me to court where upon I supply all the payment info and a bill for costs.

Thanks Mike, 3rd interview and pretty much a formality…hope to get a start date soon!

SSP

I’ve just had a bill for Council Tax, which I’ve recently paid! 😯 Bastards. I should charge them.

I’ve also had a bill for power, from EDF (never had an account with them), for the three months PRIOR to me living at a previous flat. Apparently, that I lived there at all, is enough for them to bill me, they reckon.

See you in court; that should be fun!

Tell them to add up all the money they’ve had in from everyone and if it’s still short by 4 payments at the end then you can’t have paid, bit like having an argument in a shop over you having given them a £10 note or a £20 note, you have to wait till they cash the till up to find out!! 😆

How is it that Utilities companies actually still exist?! I’ve never dealt with a single one that’s been well-run. Some are better than others but even they are still a useless shower of bastards who have no idea what is happening and seemingly no incentive to sort things out.

As soon as you owe them any money (or worse, they *think* that you owe them sometime), they’re on your back but trying to get anything out of them is like getting blood out of a stone.

I like pk-rippers suggestion, the otehr one of turning up in court with all the evidence is quite good but with the downside that *you* might get done for wasting the courts time when you had all the evidence!