-commission to increase presence across the country in the coming months

MORE persons have been utilising the services of the Public Utilities Commission (PUC) and testimony to this was the fact that the commission received 715 complaints against utility companies, in 2019.

Complaints are usually made to the PUC by customers who, in some cases, have sought to rectify an issue with a particular utility company and did not get satisfaction.
“For 2019, we had 363 complaints against GTT, 262 against GPL, 86 against GWI and four against Digicel,” said PUC’s Complaints Manager, Destra Bourne, during a press briefing at the PUC’s head office, on Friday.

The complaints against those companies ranged from disconnection and reconnection of services to allegations of tampering, billing, transfer of service, among other things. The commission was able to address some of those complaints, but others are yet to be resolved or dealt with.

Despite not being able to address every complaint, Bourne said: “each complaint is deemed important…we try to resolve those complaints in the shortest possible time.”
Her sentiments were echoed by Chairperson of the PUC, Dela Britton, who also said, every complaint, no matter how small, is treated with the same urgency.

“We treat every complaint as though it is the highest level because it impacts your quality of service as a consumer…it also impacts the operations of the particular utility so there is no degree of severity in an individual complaint, they are all treated with the same priority,” said Britton, adding that all complaints are carefully scrutinised.

Speaking about the process of dealing with complaints, Britton said when a complaint is received about a particular utility company, it is sent to that company with a stated timeframe within which the company must respond.
In some cases, there is redress and persons get refunded or their service is reconnected. It was reported that approximately $25.7M was refunded by Guyana Power & Light (GPL); $2.2M by Guyana Telephone & Telegraph (GTT) and $341,378 by Guyana Water Incorporated (GWI), in September, 2019.

There are, however, cases where the complaints are resolved without the utility company being liable for the fault. And, one such case is meter tampering.
With persons recognising the benefits of the PUC, there has been an increase in the number of complaints and Britton said complaints are even received on a daily basis.
The PUC believes that more persons can, however, be reached. And, in an effort to ensure every Guyanese is able to report an issue, the commission will be deploying more officers to various regions across the country.

“We want to deploy more persons across the country so that we can have more investigatory officers…we will do this through an internship programme with the University of Guyana and the technical institutes,” said Britton.
The internship is expected to be successful because the students/former students will have the expertise in Chemistry and other “solution-based” disciplines.

Britton said the PUC is already in discussion with the various institutions, which will have to find ways of including the internship programme into their existing, formal curriculum. The commission hopes to start the programme next month. Also, as part of the commission’s expansion programme, a new office will be opened on Monday at Henrietta Road, on the Essequibo Coast. This will be the PUC’s fourth office.

With the new office in place, the commission will be able to better assess the quality of services offered by utility companies in Essequibo and will relieve the burden of persons having to travel to Georgetown to lodge a complaint. “For the year 2019, there were four complaints for Essequibo and those complaints are not indicative that there are no complaints or there is a utopia in Essequibo, it means that people cannot access our services,” said Britton.

The functions of the commission are regulatory, investigatory, enforcement and such others as conferred on it by the Act. The commission also has the power to initiate and conduct investigations into the operations and standards of service of any public utilities under its purview. The commission is a body corporate established by virtue of the Public Utilities Commission Act No. 26 of 1990 which came into effect on October 1, 1990. This Act was amended in 1991, 1994 and in 1999. The commission is at present operating under Act No. 10 of 1999 which came into force on October 1, 1999.