LAHORE, May 22: The Sui Northern Gas Pipelines Limited (SNGPL) has sent an extra bill during the current month to certain consumers in its “effort to correct the billing cycle”.

The consumers, however, say the extra billing is aimed at fleecing the hapless customers to meet revenue targets in June.

This pattern has emerged in the last few years where the company bills some of its consumers twice in May or June, and hides behind the same excuse of correcting the billing cycle.

“It is a killing blow,” says Muhammad Javed of Wapda Town, who received the bill twice during the current month. To make the matter worse, it is official. The company accepts that it is billing people twice. Where is the regulator, which is supposed to protect consumers from such harsh and unjust practices? How can a public or private utility send bills twice, declare it as an accepted practice and defend it too? Someone needs to take note of it, and save customers, he demanded.

During last two months of every fiscal, it is not only SNGPL but the Lahore Electric Supply Company (Lesco) also goes mad for recoveries, says Malik Afzaal from the same area. All these utilities overcharge, recover extra amount to hide their losses at the expense of consumers and do so with impunity.

The minister has directed Lesco to improve recoveries, and it would shortly go berserk. All of them go after the same consumer base; the one that is paying its bills honestly. Those who are paying graft to company employees escape such an attempt and axe falls on the honest consumers. Both these utilities are now in recovery streak and fleecing consumers on different excuses. “One wonders if the Ogra (Oil and Gas Regulatory Authority) has permitted the SNGPL to “correct its billing cycle” each year during May and June, or it is acting on its own to improve its efficiency targets,” he wondered and asked: “At least, the government needs to act; stop these companies hurting their voters and hurting them beyond redemption.”

Zafar Mehmood Baqar of the SNGPL, chief billing officer, however, has other ideas about the double billing. Maintaining that it was company’s compulsion to correct the cycle, he claimed: “The company does not bill twice because of June closure, but because summer bills are at their lowest and paying two times does not hurt. The company has billed twice in May to only 150,000 consumers out of total 4.1 million costumers. It only goes to show that it is not an effort to improve recoveries but to adjust billing cycle. The company has to adjust new consumers, spread all over the two provinces – Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa and the Punjab – have to be brought into the pre-fixed cycle.

That is why some adjustments are necessary.”