Thousands of defaulting residential property owners and businesses have been cautioned by the City of Johannesburg that they face imminent blacklisting as the municipality moves to recover over R40 billion in outstanding debt.
The City said it has a growing municipal debt of more than R52 billion, which it intends to curb with its aggressive credit control campaigns.
It said it also intends to invoke its Credit Control and Debt Collection Policy by reporting defaulting payers to appropriate credit bureaus.
Group chief financial officer, Tebogo Moraka said the City has set up a Specialised Revenue Collection team that will specifically target these defaulting payers across the city. Residents who are in arrears with their municipal accounts and who have not made arrangements for settling their bills, run the risk of being blacklisted.
“Business and domestic customers who perpetually default will soon be targeted by our specialised team as part of the city’s aggressive credit control campaign. These are individual businesses and households whose municipal accounts are in arrears with more than 61 days. These steps are necessary as the City also has bills to pay like Eskom and Rand Water,” said Moraka.
The finance lead said that defaulting customers under the City’s radar for being blacklisted, are those customers who have simply refused to respond positively to the City urging them to pay their accounts over a long time.
“These customers are those who would have gone through all the City’s processes to get them to pay their debt but had simply ignored all communication."
The City would have issued them with pre-termination notices informing them of the outstanding arrears and giving them enough time (14 days) to settle their debt.
"The City would have also sent them final demand notices, sent SMSs and calling them to remind them to urgently settle their accounts without success,” said Moraka. The City was left with no choice but to hand over these perpetual defaulters to the Specialised Revenue Collection Team to begin the process of
blacklisting them, Moraka added.
Additionally, illegal connection of services will be considered a serious offence and such connections will be removed to terminate the service immediately.
The municipality said that all property owners who are struggling to service their accounts for various reasons, should approach the City, to avoid being cut off by making payment arrangement and
signing an acknowledgement of debt.
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