Ofgem: SSE to Pay GBP1 Million After Inaccurate Yearly Statements

By Maryam Cockar

U.K. energy watchdog Ofgem said Thursday that SSE PLC (SSE.LN) will pay 1 million pounds ($1.3 million) to the body's consumer-redress fund after providing some prepayment meter customers with inaccurate and misleading information in yearly statements.

The U.K. Office of Gas & Electricity Markets said it launched an investigation into the energy supplier in November 2017 after SSE reported the issue to the regulator.

Ofgem said that its investigation found that between June 2014 and September 2015 SSE sent out 1.15 million yearly statements to 580,000 of its U.K. prepayment meter customers.

"Due to an IT coding error, these annual statements had inaccurate information on the alternative cheaper tariff available to customers and inaccurate estimates of how much they could save annually by switching to them," Ofgem said.

"Some statements also overestimated the annual savings the customers could make by changing their prepayment meter to a standard credit meter paying by direct debit, as well as by moving to paperless billing".

Ofgem said that the level of harm by SEE's incorrect statements is low as only a small proportion of customers would have acted on the information by switching, and that the average saving for each customer would have been low.

The regulator said SSE has since improved its processes to prevent incorrect statements being issued again.

Write to Maryam Cockar at [e-mail]

(END) Dow Jones Newswires

June 07, 2018 02:57 ET (06:57 GMT)

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