Jirama will launch the hunt for unpaid invoices

2023-05-25 10:04:39

The unpaid bills of Jirama users would amount to 200 billion ariary. These would be the unpaid debts of customers, individuals or companies between 2018 and 2022. Faced with the situation and the various difficulties of Jirama, the Council of Ministers yesterday approved the establishment of a service dedicated to collection within this state-owned company and plans to use outsourcing for this service if necessary.

Collecting outstanding payments from customers is part of the company’s recovery roadmap. A few weeks ago, it announced that it wanted to directly cut off the supply of electricity and water to subscribers, businesses or individuals with unpaid bills without issuing warning notices, arguing that the state of arrears appears in the invoice sent at the end of each month to the subscriber.

If we look at the figures for unpaid invoices, it is obvious that Jirama’s collection procedure is flawed, as are its other services. Often poor management at the level of invoicing leads to erroneous invoices, invoices not received, late distribution leading to late payment, not to mention long queues at the checkout at the time of payment. The lack of staff of collection agents, the cronyism between the client and the Jirama agent are not left out. With such a heavy customer portfolio that has continued to grow over the years, it is equally surprising that Jirama never thought of setting up a dedicated collection service.

The State, through the public administration remains however, one of the worst payers of the Jirama. In 2022, the State’s outstanding payments to Jirama amounted to around 350 billion ariary, half of which is made up of unpaid bills from universities.

However, recommendations were issued by the Court of Auditors in its 2016 and 2017 public report, presented in 2018, such as increasing the number of debt collectors and debt collectors, taking measures to deal with public administration arrears and the reduction of technical losses in production. It is clear that nothing has changed years later. Technical losses were pointed out in this report, at the time they were already around 31%. A technical loss also mentioned yesterday by the Council of Ministers and which is estimated at 150 billion Ar.