BASSETERRE, St. Kitts – TENS of millions of dollars in arrears to the Electricity Department has raised the concern of Cabinet and the body of government ministers has pressed for aggressive collection strategy to put an end to the unsustainable practice.
While the Electricity Department has been recently faced with a unique set of challenges to providing a reliable supply of electricity for its consumers, many businesses and domestic users have lapsed heavily in their payments. This trend, according to a recent post-Cabinet briefing, can go on no longer.
After assessing the accounts receivable of the Electricity Department last week, Senator responsible for Information Hon. Nigel Carty issued a clear charge for the relevant departments to clamp down on noncompliance.
“It was revealed that the Department has tens of millions of dollars of outstanding money to collect from both domestic and commercial consumers. Cabinet agreed that this situation is highly untenable and has asked that a mechanism be quickly put in place to enforce collection of outstanding sums,” Carty reported in last week’s post-Cabinet briefing.
Consequently, the Ministries of Finance and Public Utilities have been given a broad mandate to recommend mechanisms to deal with collecting overdue receivables. Though this has been set, the details of this mandate have not been made public.
SKNVibes contacted the Assistant Financial Secretary, Sylvia Manning-Walters, who explained that collecting outstanding payments is the responsibility of the department from which the goods or services were purchased and not of the Ministry of Finance. She noted, however, that the Ministry of Finance intervenes in matters of policy and administration if arrears climb to unsustainable levels.
“The collection of arrears in this case is the responsibility of the Electricity Department. If there is a build up of arrears in a particular department, the Ministry [of Finance] will see what the issues are and see how the arrears can be reduced. We provide assistance and we deal with policy advice,” Manning-Walters told this media house.
Going forward, the Ministry of Finance will assess the policies of collection that govern the Electricity Department and make revisions to them, if necessary.
Manning-Walters stressed however that the enforcement of these policies would be critical to any real change in collections. While she declined to comment on the efficiency of the collection strategy used by the Electricity Department, she said it is very important for consumers to pay up after being provided a service.
“Once anybody owes, whether they purchase goods or services from the government or even the private sector, once they incur a liability, you have an obligation to pay. Persons should not be consuming goods and services from any company and then not pay for their services,” she said.
Efforts to get a comment from officials in the Electricity Billing Department were unsuccessful.
Acting Manager of the Department, Bertil Browne told SKNVibes that he is not willing to speak to the media on the matter and would therefore not make a statement.
Details as to the Department’s policy on collecting arrears, the timeframe in which this amount was left to accumulate, the names and number of noncompliant businesses and the procedure for dealing with noncompliance are still unclear at this point.
