Counting error led to inflated S&CC arrears report: AHPETC

SINGAPORE — Contrary to the eye-catching figure they reported to the authorities last year, the proportion of households in arrears over service and conservancy charges (S&CC) for three months and over in estates under Aljunied-Hougang-Punggol East Town Council (AHPETC) stands at 5.66 per cent as of September, the town council revealed yesterday.

The figure is well below the 29.4 per cent, as of April 2013, it had reported to the Housing and Development Board, and the difference was due to errors that led to double counting.

In a statement posted on its website yesterday, AHPETC chairman and Workers’ Party (WP) chairperson Sylvia Lim said an additional step to avoid counting the same household twice was unintentionally omitted.

AHPETC did not have an operational computer system to report S&CC arrears in the format required by the Ministry of National Development (MND). As a result, staff had to prepare reports based on data generated by AHPETC’s IT system and extracted through manual sorting and counting, she said.

She noted that 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 three or more months for April 2013 came down by about S$88,000 from the previous month, to about S$1.9 million. But the percentage of households in arrears for the same period spiked from 7.42 per cent to 29.4 per cent.

The 29.4 per cent figure, which was later published in the Ministry of National Development’s (MND) Town Council Management Report last November, drew sharp criticism from the ministry. Minister of State (National Development) Desmond Lee warned it could have serious implications for residents, sparking a war of words between the Government and AHPETC.

Minister for Culture, Community and Youth Lawrence Wong also chimed in, saying in a commentary the town council’s silence on the issue signalled that “something is seriously wrong”. This led to Ms Lim urging Mr Wong “not to confuse or alarm the public by speculating on whether the S&CC arrears situation has worsened or whether AHPETC is facing ‘bigger problems”.

Apart from AHPETC, only Potong Pasir received anything other than a “green rating” for S&CC arrears management in the Town Council Management Report. Generally, if a town council has a “green rating”, it means fewer than four in 100 households owe arrears for three months or more, and less than 40 per cent of the monthly collectible S&CC for the town is overdue.

In her statement yesterday, Ms Lim said AHPETC could not share details on the arrears earlier as time was needed to review the data and process it internally. “We acknowledge the oversight, and regret the error in reporting to HDB,” she said.

Ms Lim also said the manual process employed by AHPETC was not ideal 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,” she said, referring to the merger with Hougang after the by-election in 2012.

Ms Lim said AHPETC embarked on a roadmap to enhance its aggregated arrears reporting module sometime last November. The council has completed and tested a module to aggregate S&CC data for one to less than three months and for three months and above, which will improve productivity in reporting, she said.