ActewAGL's inability to accurately invoice at least 32,500 of its customers for their gas usage is the latest in a string of remarkable process failures by a range of organisations endured by their customers.
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When an organisation, either public or private, fails to perform a core function to community expectations it usually raises the question of whether or not the management and staff are up to the job.
These issues were certainly extensively explored during the official and unofficial post mortems carried out in the wake of the 2016 $30 million census fail and the, as yet unresolved, Centrelink "robodebt" debacle.
While the ActewAGL billing farce has not received the same degree of national publicity as these two cause celebres, principally because most of the damage has been localised to Canberra, it has caused a lot of people considerable grief and alarm.
Nobody wants to come home to a utility bill that is five or six times what they were expecting.
It is even worse for social security recipients, pensioners and retirees on a fixed income who often have to budget down to the last dollar to make ends meet.
While Actew AGL has said the issue arose because of changes dictated by the regulator, the fact remains that newspapers elsewhere in the country do not appear to have been inundated with complaints of wildly inaccurate meter "estimations" and overcharging to anything like the extent the Canberra Times has been.
If other utility companies, which have been required to comply with the same conditions, can rise to the challenge and still invoice clients correctly then surely ActewAGL's customers can expect the same.
CEO Michael Costello said the organisation took full responsibility and that it was sorry for the inconvenience. He had "failed to foresee the scale of the issues and to notify customers ahead of time about the changes and potential effects" (of overcharging due to bill estimations).
Mr Costello also said ActewAGL valued the community's trust, an assertion that sits oddly with the way it has managed a customer relations debacle of significant proportions that has been bubbling away for months now.
The organisation's alleged responses to many of the disgruntled gas users who have been writing into this newspaper since before Christmas have ranged from farcical, to Orwellian double-speak to just plain absurd.
That is has taken months to issue an apology and an incomplete explanation of what has taken place just isn't acceptable, particularly given ActewAGL's virtual monopoly supplier status with more than 90 per cent market penetration within the ACT.
ActewAGL's electricity and gas customers could be forgiven for continuing to check their own meters carefully when the next bill arrives, despite Mr Costello's assurances.
