The DA says it’s no surprise the City of Joburg doesn’t have a Revenue Roadmap plan.
|||It’s no surprise the City of Joburg doesn’t have a Revenue Roadmap plan.
The City should now explain how the billing problems will be fixed, the DA said on Sunday.
“Revelations in The Star that the City of Johannesburg has no adequate Revenue Roadmap document to assist in resolving the city’s long-running billing crisis sadly come as no surprise to the DA members of the city’s section 79 finance oversight committee,” said councillor Patrick Atkinson, the DA finance spokesman in Joburg.
The Revenue Roadmap was the 19-month plan announced by the city management in November to sort out billing system problems.
On Friday, The Star reported that despite months of attempts to get a copy of the full Revenue Roadmap plan from the city management, no coherent plan could be produced.
Instead, the city had handed over two documents after a formal request in terms of the Promotion of Access to Information Act.
Neither had been a detailed plan and one appeared to be unfinished.
Atkinson said the DA had also been unable to find a copy and had repeatedly asked the council’s finance committee chairman for this.
“On each occasion, we were promised that the documents would be supplied to us, but none ever materialised,” Atkinson said.
“The delay in providing this documentation, vital to one of the city’s most important financial projects and something absolutely critical to the city’s financial viability, comes down to the fact that these documents never existed in the first place.”
Atkinson said city manager Trevor Fowler “needs to answer the residents of Johannesburg as to how he thinks the billing crisis can be resolved where there is no formalised plan in place against which actions and progress can be measured”.
He said the city had issued “misleading and over-optimistic statements” about the resolution of outstanding billing queries.
“The city has claimed to have achieved the goals of its now non-existent roadmap and has claimed that there are only 1 600 queries left to resolve, down from 66 000 in October 2011. This simply does not accord with the anecdotal evidence DA councillors receive from city residents on a daily basis,” he said.
“At great expense, the city recently engaged the services of auditing firm KPMG to assist with the resolution of the thousands of outstanding billing queries. It may make more sense for an independent report on the state of the billing crisis to be issued by KPMG based on their experience in assisting the city with resolving the crisis.
“This may give long-suffering city residents more comfort than misleading updates from the city on a plan which now appears not to have existed in the first place.”
The Star