Ministry finds hole in NEPRA excessive bills report

Says power regulator presented ‘exaggerated statistics’

ISLAMABAD:

 

The Ministry of Power has highlighted flaws in a report recently published by the country’s power regulator with regard to issuance of inflated bills to the electricity consumers across the country, stating that the report contains “exaggerated and false statistics.”

On December 4, the National Electric Power Regulatory Authority (Nepra) had issued an inquiry report regarding excessive billing by distribution companies (DISCOs).

In order to evaluate the findings of the Nepra’s inquiry report, the Ministry of Energy devised a two-pronged strategy.
It directed all DISCOs to evaluate and provide detailed analyses on the assumptions, process and findings of the inquiry report while also constituted an independent and impartial committee to review the basis/assumptions, methodology and findings of the report.

On the basis of the input received from DISCOS as well as evaluation of the committee, the ministry compiled a preliminary report which was released on Tuesday, December 12.

According to the ministry's findings, most of the data sets employed by Nepra’s professionals in their respective analyses were inaccurate or invalid. This resulted in exaggerated and false statistics of the relevant indicators.

It said the Nepra report suffers from issues of quality control and arithmetic and data processing errors.

“An unrepresentative and biased random sampling approach was utilized by the professionals of Nepra which is in contravention to the fundamental concept and practices adopted for the purpose of random sampling.”

It said the report did not incorporate in due process of analysis a consideration of the ground realities and operational constraints of the distribution business like weekends and gazette holidays, feeder bifurcations.

“Lack of robust exploratory data analysis and absence of cross-validation mechanism in the inquiry report misled the focus to the applicable billing process and resulted in sensationalism,” it added.

Nepra, in its inquiry report, highlighted that it received several complaints from consumers across the entire country about DISCOS charging excessive and incorrect bills during the months of July and August 2023.

Read NEPRA report exposes overbilling scandal

Later Nepra held a public hearing on September 10 in which billing related issues were also highlighted including mismatch of snaps-based meter reading and on-bill reading, invisible/missing meter reading snaps, shifting of categories/slabs on account of extension of billing cycles beyond 30 days, etc.

Based on the statistics provided by Nepra, for the months of July and August, approximately 76% and 81% of consumers were billed within the due date.

Further, pursuant to the same report, approximately 3.2 and 0.8 million consumers were affected in the month of July and August respectively on account of slab changes, status change from protected to [un]protected and status change from life-line to non-life line.

The ministry, however, noted that “the statistics quoted by Nepra are not correct”

It said for the month of July, in actual, approximately, 86% of consumers were billed within the due date whereas Nepra quoted the same to be around 76%.

“With the inclusion of the effect of holidays in the billing cycle (which has not been captured in Nepra’s analysis and has been explained above in the Existing Billing Design), the actual figure comes to around 98%.

“[According] to Nepra’s statistics, approximately 3.2 million consumers were affected in the month of July on account of slab changes, status change from protected to [un]protected' and status change from life-line to non-life line.

“However, the actualized data indicates that only approximately 0.8 million consumers were affected under the same categories, resulting in the erroneous exaggeration of said statistics by approximately 300%,” the ministry said.