City asks VECO for discount

CEBU, Philippines - The Cebu City Government wants the Visayan Electric Company to provide discounts for early payment if they will insist on imposing surcharges.

Accounting clerk Haidie Abella-Consul said her superiors told VECO in one of their meetings that it should provide discounts for early payment and not only penalize them for failure to pay the bills on time.

Consul said the officials of the power utility and the city government are meeting almost every week regarding the surcharge issue but have not reached an agreement.

She said her superiors remain unwilling to submit to VECO’s surcharge policy because it is not allowed by the Commission on Audit. VECO has stared imposing surcharges against accounts with unpaid bills since April.

Consul however does not include the surcharge when processing the voucher for the payment of the bills.

VECO has started imposing a surcharge, which represents two percent of the previous unpaid bills, to some accounts that have unpaid bills during the previous years.

Contrary to what they know at first, Consul said VECO also imposed surcharges on last year’s unpaid bills.

The city has unpaid bills last year because of the delay in the approval of the budget under the Supplemental Budget No. 5.   The General Services Office then requested for P41.9 million for the electricity expenses to cover for the rest of 2010 because the city’s budget for electricity under the 2010 Annual Budget was not enough.

SB 5 was approved in November last year which caused the delay in the payment of bills for October to December.

According to Consul, there are still unpaid previous bills that the city was not able to pay for some reason. She said she is yet to check how much are the balance but for schools alone, VECO has recorded about P8 million unpaid bills.

These unpaid bills of schools cannot be paid until the local school board is able to determine their savings last year because they can only source the payment for the previous year’s payables from their savings.

Consul said VECO implements the ‘first in and first out’ policy where the payment for the bills that they process supposedly for this year are deducted from the unpaid bills last year so some accounts have been imposed with surcharge. —(FREEMAN)