Residential S&CC arrears rate 'drastically' down to 5.66 per cent: AHPETC

The Aljunied-Hougang-Punggol East Town Council (AHPETC) announced on Monday that its Service and Conservancy Charges (S&CC) arrears rate as of September 30, 2014 stood at 5.66 per cent for residential units which had defaulted on payments for three months and above.

The statement said that this number was “drastically” lower than the 29.37 originally reported in April 2013, which had been inaccurate due to “reporting and human errors”.

AHPETC released the figures to the media on Monday after recent controversy over the management of the town council.

Minister of State for National Development Desmond Lee earlier called the 29.37 per cent arrears rate “shocking” in a previous news report, pointing out the opposition-run AHPETC’s failure to submit monthly S&CC arrears reports since May 2013.

Here is the statement reproduced in full:  

AHPETC wishes to announce that its S&CC arrears rate (for 3 months and above) for residential units as of 30 September 2014 is 5.66% of households. The corresponding arrears rate for commercial units for the same period is 7.24%.

We wish to explain that we are sharing the information now rather than earlier, as time was needed to have the data and process reviewed both internally and also by our consultants before release. AHPETC had also undertaken to explain further its arrears situation and management, which we now do.

Our review has found that the above S&CC arrears rates are generated from valid S&CC records that are maintained in the AHPETC’s financial system.

What AHPETC lacks is a fully operational computer system to assist AHPETC to do aggregated S&CC arrears reporting in the format required by the Ministry of National Development (MND). In the absence of such a system, all reports submitted to MND before this were prepared by staff based on data generated by AHPETC’s IT system and extracted through manual sorting and counting.

AHPETC acknowledges that this manual process is not the most ideal and efficient way of doing aggregated arrears reporting, as the data size is voluminous. The former Hougang Town Council was able to do such manual reporting in the past as the number of households under management then was a fraction of what AHPETC is handling.

Such a process is tedious and subject to reporting and human errors. In the aftermath of the withdrawal of the then-computer system in 2011, that was the only way for AHPETC to comply with the aggregated arrears reporting requirements from MND until AHPETC’s own system could be enhanced. AHPETC was thus submitting arrears reports to HDB late. In addition, on 18 June 2013, AHPETC informed HDB that it was still unable to submit the April 2013 arrears report as it was sorting out a bug in its IT programme for generating arrears reports.

The arrears rate of 29.4% for April 2013 submitted to MND was an instance of reporting and human errors. An additional step of sorting to avoid double-counting of the same household was inadvertently omitted. A comparison of the arrears report submitted for March 2013 and April 2013 would have shown up the error, as the amount of arrears owed for 3 or more months for April 2013 came down by about $88,000 from March 2013, but the % of households in arrears of 3 or more months increased drastically from 7.42% for March 2013 to 29.4% for April 2013.

Unfortunately everyone did not notice the anomaly in the April 2013 report that was later published in the Town Council Management Report. We acknowledge the oversight, and regret the error in reporting to HDB.

Nonetheless, it is important to note that the accuracy, integrity, monitoring and management of each individual S&CC account are not compromised in any way by the manual statistics reporting process described above at any point in time.

Moving on to improvements, AHPETC embarked on a roadmap to enhance its aggregated arrears reporting module sometime in November 2014. It has completed and tested a module to aggregate S&CC data for 1 to less than 3 months and for 3 months and above aging. This enhancement will improve productivity in reporting.

AHPETC will strive to make further improvements to better serve its residents. We thank our residents and the public for their patience and understanding in this matter.

SYLVIA LIM
CHAIRMAN
ALJUNIED-HOUGANG-PUNGGOL EAST TOWN COUNCIL

26 January 2015