Audit Caps Gushing UW Water Bill Staff Didn’t Detect Bad Meters; City To Refund $568,200

Faulty meters and neglectful oversight at the University of Washington are being blamed for more than half a million dollars in overcharges on water and waste-water bills in a 20-month period, the state auditor’s office says.

The city of Seattle, which provides the water, has agreed to a $568,200 refund through credit on the UW’s bills.

The UW paid at least $369,528 in city water-bill overcharges and $198,672 in overcharges for waste water. The bills, paid from March 1995 to November 1996, were about 20 percent - about $43,700 a month - too high, the auditor’s report says.

The problems stemmed largely from high staff turnover and procedures are now in place to prevent a repeat, a university official said Thursday.

According to the audit, the UW violated state law by failing to “establish effective controls to ensure faulty meters and leaks in utility lines are caught and corrected in a timely manner.”

Internal reports noting a billing problem were distributed, but “no one seemed to either understand the reports, use the reports for analysis or question unusual activity appearing on the reports,” the audit said.

Staff turnover in the UW office that processed utility bills meant nobody fully understood the billings and produced the erroneous belief that the city was responsible for maintaining the meters, auditors said.

The meters may have been malfunctioning as early as 1994, the report said, and the UW’s overpayments may be even higher.

State Auditor Brian Sonntag said the city and the university discovered the faulty water meter before the audit, “yet nothing was done about it until we received a communication from a state employee whistle-blower at the university.”

Jeraldine McCray, the UW assistant vice president for facilities services, disputes that.

By the time university officials sat down with state auditors early this year, the reimbursement from the city had already been arranged and procedures were being worked on to prevent a repeat, she said Thursday.

She confirmed the problems stemmed largely from high turn-over among personnel who over-saw the billings.

Inexperienced workers “who did not have a frame of reference” did not catch big discrepancies in billings, McCray said.

That has been fixed by assigning two people to oversee the billings, and giving them tools such as historical graphs that make it easier to tell when water usage is skewed.