'LESCO employees involved in excessive billing'

The Lahore Electric Supply Company (LESCO) employees are not taking photographs of B2, B3 and B4 electricity meters for printing on the back of electricity bills and are involved in excessive billing throughout the region, said industry sources. So much so, they added, the commercial procedure demands from the concerned SDOs to visit personally the factory premises to record meter reading but this requirement is being ignored by the respective officials by and large. Majority prefers to send lower staff for the purpose which leads to opening up of a door to corrupt practices.
Interestingly, the commercial procedure also requires from both the SDOs and ExEns to place their photograph around the factory premises where the electricity meter has been installed, as no other LESCO official can visit the site without accompanying the authorized official.
They further added that the Company rules also require from the SDOs and the ExEns to handover the reading in writing to the factory owner after recording and photographing it. But all such precautionary calls are falling on the deaf ears of the concerned authorities in various regions and the LESCO high-ups are slumbering over this gross violation.
The industry sources said the violation of the commercial procedure is being intended intentionally by the LESCO staff in order to adjust line losses on the one hand and blackmail the factory owners on the other. There are a total of 227,842 industrial consumers out of 250 million total electricity consumers in the country. Also, the number of complaints against excessive billing is also very alarming. A total of 1.2 million complaints have been lodged with the LESCO Complaint Cell against excessive billing over the first half of the current fiscal, which speaks a volume about the continuous malpractices in the Company.
Out of these 1.2 million complaints, the Company had credited excessively charged money to 515,002 consumers while another 643,890 were compensated with the crediting of both money and units. Meanwhile, the number of those not being put on record also runs into millions, said insiders of the Company.