An open letter to …

Dear Aurora Energy,

I owe you money. Lots of it. Never denied it…….

I know I don’t really have a good history of paying your accounts.

When I say history, I mean pre-2008.

On June 6 2008, I started on a ‘Payment Plan’ through your hardship area. My outstanding amount was $1304.02.

My payment plan was supposed to end on June 6 2013. This was longer than usual at the time, and I thank you for giving me the opportunity to pay the debt off with no stress.

This worked really well to start with, I arranged to pay a little bit more than the minimum you wanted.

You gave me monthly accounts, and it was good to see the balance of my debt being slowly decreased. The account you sent me on 23 November 2010 had an outstanding balance $210.64 on my original debt.

For some reason (unknown to the Energy Ombudsman and The Australian Energy Regulator), at the end of 2010 you ceased detailing the debt component on your quarterly accounts. Advice via The Energy Ombudsman states our account was in credit of $661.79 as at 12 July 2011.

Nowhere on our bill was this shown.

In August 2012, you phoned me, as a courtesy to let me know that my bill for the previous quarter was large. You also informed me that our payments on our payment plan were not covering our usage, nor our debt, and because I hadn’t been billed properly, there was an extra $2637.88 owing.

Thank you for crediting me $912 of that figure. Being that you hadn’t billed me for it, and it was older than 9 months, you weren’t allowed to claim it anyway. I researched and learnt this, and was a bit disgusted with you making it sound like you were doing me a favour.

Then you told me that to be able to stay on our hardship payment plan, I had to double my fortnightly payments to you… To me this was extremely unreasonable, I told you this, and informed you that we would watch our usage, and curb it, to match or be lower than our payments.

I also started asking questions. I asked you copious amounts of questions. Why did they only get answered after I approached The Energy Ombudsman?

I asked for an appointment to sit down with someone who could explain how it had all worked out. You refused.

Because we had 2 large accounts last year, and you weren’t keeping tabs on our usage/payments, and there was no way I could see my debt component because it is no longer listed on the accounts, it could not bee seen anywhere that there was a rapidly rising debt.

So now my accounts sits at $3794.44.

You are charging me interest, this is very damaging, as our payments are above our usage, but the interest you add only raises more debt. I asked you to not charge interest as there is a Centrelink concession on the account.

It was reasonable of you to make us fully aware of our usage, and thank you. It wasn’t reasonable to out of the blue, ask me to double my payments.

It took 5 months to bring usage down under payment levels, as I told you I would do this and you gave me the chance to prove it. Thank you.

Five weeks after our payment plan is supposed to be finished, my debt to you was meant to be gone. It has quadrupled.

Last time I tried to negotiate this with you, you insisted I make contact through a welfare agency. Once I had explained my situation to them, showed them all my paperwork, they said they didn’t know if they could help me, because I had done more myself than they could ever do.

I am asking you to recalculate my account, incorporating my concession where eligible, removing the interest you have charged, not charge any more interest, and leave my power connected unless two consecutive accounts are in debt.

Megan Tucker says: “We are a family of 6, in a 4 bedroom house with wood heating. 2 adults, 2 teenagers, 2 under 10. Renting (from a relative). Our home phone/ internet is Dodo, have been for years, they have the best offer to suit us. No credit/store cards, a debit Visa for convenience. I have all my power bills back to July 2006. I have had enough of these people being too bloody hard to deal with. Of course, I have spoken to a financial counsellor, and could go ahead with bankruptcy, which would clear my debt, and start me off as a new customer with Aurora and no history.