EDITOR – I am getting very frustrated by our metro administration or lack thereof. There are only two options, enabling – doing whatever is possible to make the paying municipal taxes as easy as possible, or disabling – making this already disliked task as difficult as possible.
In engineering there is a saying, if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it. What was wrong with the last municipal accounts system that motivated meddling, wasting money and going backwards to a system which is very difficult to understand?
I see there have been a few similar articles. I have bided my time, but now about three months into this new fancy system and I just don’t see any light.
The address applicable to the account appears no less than five times in the document with all sorts of reference numbers and other superfluous information.
Lots of dotted lines to dazzle the eye, forming tables which could be arranged so as to be much easier to read.
The column heading for the electricity account is laughable. It is baffling to understand how or why the charges on the new bills seem to have dramatically escalated.
No wonder the Metro is cash-strapped as confusion creates uncertainty and coupled to this a further reluctance to pay. The stats that I come across from time to time of the percentage of people who are up to date with their municipal accounts is so dismal.
And to crown it all, I recently applied and was granted a 50 per cent pensioners discount for my rates on my residence, this worked for one month before the new fancy system and has now just been omitted.
Is there anybody who is held accountable for this debacle, and what is the penalty? This new system will compromise the payment of municipal accounts, and the realisation is scary that as usual those that pay will have to fork out more to cover the others who don’t.
I ask for an enabling administration, please can somebody do something about this sorry state of affairs and soon.
Very concerned citizen
Westville
*letter shortened
