More than a half of households gets improper electricity bills. EPS has not controlled electric meters for years. 1,8 million devices without a seal. Every other household in Serbia gets improper electricity bill. Electricity consumption is measured by electric meters that mustn’t be used, because their accuracy is not confirmed. Estimations show that 1,8 million households in our country have such electric meters.
Although “Elektrodistribucija Srbije” has obligation to control accuracy of electric meters every 12 years, Authority Direction for Measures and Valuable Metals explain that it wasn’t done in most of cases.
-We found around 50 electric meters without any valid state’s seal when we were doing metric supervision over using electric meters- Lucija Dujovic, Deputy Director of this state direction that does business in Ministry of Finance and Industry, states.
-These meters mustn’t be used according the law.
Direction adds that only electric meter with valid steal can give appropriate measuring results after which charge of used electricity is done.
-EPS, who is the owner of meters, is responsible for ordinary validation of electric meters, not users of these devices i.e. citizens- Djurovic says.
Electric meters that were validated in 1991 for the last time were found during control of Direction Inspector. Only a few devices required state seal and some of them didn’t work at all.
According to Petar Bogosavljevic’s words, President of Serbian Consumers Movement, improper electric meters directly endanger consumers’ rights because they don’t have clear calculation of how much they should pay for used kilowatts.
-The obligation of supervisory corporation is to replace or repair counters and they have always had planned budget for it- Bogosavljevic explains. However, as they were starting other businesses, they transferred assets for other obligations and they didn’t replace electric meters. The big problem is that we have improper economy relations already. Some citizens pay less and some pay more. Consumers whose electric meters reads someone else’s kilowatts are forced to pay for others.
Fake Belgrade’s bill
Improper electric meters are present in cities with the biggest number of consumers the most, so people from Belgrade, Vojvodina and South Serbia gets improper electricity bills. The most regular seals were recorded in Cacak where almost 90% of electric meters read electricity correctly.
Source; Serbia Energy/Novosti
