Audit of the leasing contract: Sen’eau, a nebulous invoicing system

Not a day goes by without a consumer complaining about a sudden increase in their water bill when the supply is often lacking, as is the case this weekend with the disruptions announced. The invoicing carried out by Sen’eau is a real nebula as evidenced by an audit report obtained by the newspaper Libération.

Libération reveals that an audit of the leasing contract linking the State to Sen’eau was carried out. The independent experts were interested in all aspects of this contract, which hit the headlines, in particular the invoicing applied by Sen’eau.

To this end, the auditors made several observations, namely “the non-compliance with the number of regulatory billing days which exceeds 60 days for most private customers (56%) and which consumer associations have always complained about » ; “the compromise of indexes taken from smartphones when this data was uploaded to the Aar-Sen’eau application”; the “non-existence of blocking controls preventing more than two (02) successive invoicing per estimate during the year for the same customer”; “the impossibility of ensuring the effectiveness of the presentation of invoices in the absence of survey reports requested without success even if the satisfaction survey carried out by Grant Thornton did not reveal any major anomalies » ; “relatively long processing times for complaints, sometimes exceeding 3 months”; “types of meters like Baylan, Zenner and Itron implicated due to their calibration failure”; “fairly frequent complaints relating to the high cost of bills (60%)”; “an insufficiently protected information system, particularly with the absence of procedures for managing access, authorizations and problems; as well as data backup and restoration procedures.

Even more serious, the Sen’eau auditor expressed reservations about the invoicing, writing “due to the weaknesses noted in the general IT controls relating to the customer management system and the impossibility of obtaining the response upon our request for confirmation relating to volumes, we were not able to determine whether adjustments to the recorded turnover would have been necessary.