Glitch triple bills Wasilla customers

WASILLA — A software glitch sent city workers scrambling Thursday as around 300 water and sewer customers were triple-billed.

Troy Tankersley, the finance director for the city of Wasilla, said that no money was removed from anyone’s account.

“The city hasn’t received a dime,” Tankersley said.

But a lot of people are being inconvenienced, most notably the customers who were charged twice for this month and once for last month.

The city immediately killed the billing process but folks who are set up to have the money automatically removed from their accounts — something like 300 accounts, Tankersley said — did get notice the money was about to come out.

Which, for most banks, means the money was put on hold and is not useable.

“It freezes the money on those accounts,” Tankersley said. “It can potentially create (insufficient funds) issues.”

He reiterated that the only auto-pay customers were inconvenienced by the billing error.

“We appreciate the people that do. It makes our lives a lot easier. Except for this time,” he said.

He and his staff worked Thursday and Friday to call all the banks that were affected. But with so many national chains operating in downtown, a lot of these banks are out of state. It’s taking some time.

“The banks are working with us as fast as we can get a hold of them,” he said.

There are also time zone issues in that East Coast banks close for business four hours earlier than the city of Wasilla.

The banks have assured him, though, that overdraft fees and other such charges will be forgiven. But people who don’t keep a whole lot of money in their accounts might have a rough few days.

The problem is more acute for people who have their accounts tied to debit cards or savings accounts rather than credit cards. Tankersley said the city is trying to find a way to sort those two groups of customers so the city can fix the problem with the non-credit customers first. But that’s a tall order.

Meanwhile, the city is working with the developer of the software that caused the glitch — ICVerify — to figure out exactly what happened and to make sure it doesn’t happen again.

“We won’t process another batch until we’re assured that it’s been fixed,” Tankersley said.

Contact Andrew Wellner at andrew.wellner@frontiersman.com or 352-2270.