Tiaki Wai customers facing direct-debit delays on Wellington water bills

Hundreds of direct-debit payments to Wellington's new water agency for residents' first bills are stuck in processing delays.

Tiaki Wai says the issue is mainly due to incomplete or incorrect information on forms, while a Wellington resident says the delay will impact her budget.

Sandra McCallum said she filled out a direct-debit form to the region's new water entity in August, so she could meet the first deadline of 1 September.

Now October, she'd been told the payments were highly unlikely to start in November.

"I think it is a real shortfall in planning," she said. "They must have known they were going to deal with tens of thousands of people who were going to set up direct debits.

"I imagine a lot of us haven't been paying, not for want of trying but because their systems haven't been set up well."

McCallum said she wasn't told her direct-debit form had any issues.

RNZ has received other messages from residents, who say they want to pay their bill, but have been unable, due to the delays.

McCallum said her total annual water bill was about $2500 and, as a pensioner, she wanted to spread that cost over a year. Now it would be a larger bill spread over 8-9 months.

"It impacts on my budget planning," she said. "There will be people who are absolutely unable to [manage] it."

Tiaki Wai's chief customer officer Liza Gunn said this was the first time residents had received a separate water services bill and many had chosen to do direct debits.

"While most direct debits are now in place, some hundreds are still in progress, mainly due to incomplete or incorrect information on their forms," she said. "We expect and understand there will be teething problems."

Direct-debit payments that had not yet been set up would be spread out across the remainder of the financial year.

Gunn said Tiaki Wai would pro-actively contact affected people to complete their direct-debit set-up. She urged anyone with concerns to contact the agency.

"No penalties will be applied for late payment of water charges for an initial period and no-one's water will be turned off because they have not paid their bill," she said. "This applies to all customers, whether they wish to pay by direct debit or otherwise."

Recently, RNZ reported about 30,000 people across the region had not paid their first bills. Second bills are due to arrive to Wellington, Lower and Upper Hutt, and Porirua residents and businesses from late October.

Wellington Mayor Andrew Little said Tiaki Wai faced a major job setting up their own independent billing, finance and customer management systems.

Under Wellington Water, much of that was managed through city councils in the region, because water charges were incorporated into council rates, he said.

"That's a big change and it means shifting tens of thousands of account holders onto a whole new system, and that was always going to have teething problems and challenges."