Sunday, April 20, 2014

TLC? Open and Honest? Yeah, right!

This will be short and sweet - simply to publish a number of warnings and decisions against TLC from the last year or two. I'll be updating and adding more detail later.

1. The Commerce Commission investigated a number of issues around TLC's practices - the investigation ran for about a year from mid 2012.

At the end of this the Commerce Commission issued TLC with the following formal warning:

http://tinyurl.com/comcom-warning-tlc-201307

 2. In July 2012 TLC tried to expand the scope of a partial exemption granted to it in 2005 so that instead of the few hundred homes covered by their original application, they would apply the exemption to what I believe is well north of 2000 homes.

I complained and eventually the Electricity Authority issued TLC with a warning:

http://tinyurl.com/ea-warning-tlc-201302

Note the date on the EA's warning letter was incorrect - maybe that tells you something also - and should actually be 2013 instead of 2012!

3. Even after the Electricity Authority warning as above (and a few people being reinstated to the correct tariff), TLC continued to try to claim that in fact I had not actually been eligible for their Low Fixed Charge tariff in the few years leading up to July 2012 (and this even though they also put me on it).

A further complaint through the Electricity and Gas Complaints Commission eventually (after TLC had tried everything it could) resulted in Commissioner Judi Jones issuing a binding decision against TLC. That process is documented in the following links:

http://tinyurl.com/egcc-proposed-39982
http://tinyurl.com/egcc-final-39982
http://tinyurl.com/tlc-reject-final-39982
http://tinyurl.com/egcc-binding-39982

There is much more to be said about these decisions, including the fact that in all cases no details would be available for the public to read directly without someone first obtaining the documents (i.e. via the Official Information Act) from the various authorities and publishing it.

Why is that exactly?