Proof of Utility Meter Software Problems and Gross Incompetence

Here is a copy of someone's October 2010 water/sewer bill.  The name, address, and account number have been digitally removed to protect the individual's identity.

This individual has no water leaks and when reading the meter manually on 11/14/2010, the utility customer figures that they should have been charged 3,000 gallons on the water/sewer meter and 2,000 on the irrigation meter.  This is the 2nd time this individual has run into a similar issue.

Common sense would figure that if the city knows they have issues of this magnitude, they would be spot checking bills for gross errors like this BEFORE mailings go out, or have some sort of flag in the system with a report or something, that would indicate such a large irregularity from the previous month's readings. This is gross incompetence on multiple levels!  A couple of months ago 2 identical sets of utility bills were sent to each utility account.  A big waste of mailing supplies, postage, and tax payer money.  Didn't the billing department think something was strange when twice the volume of bills were being mailed than normal?  Why are things like this happening without a clue until the utility customers bring it to the Utility Department's attention?

Obviously, the size of this particular billing error is easy to spot right away.  Smaller problems like this may not be as easy to detect by the utility customer.  It would be very likely, they would just pay the inflated bill thinking that they must have used that much water, but would have no way to know for sure since the meter readings are several days prior to the bill coming in the mail.  Who has time to manually check their water meter after they get every utility bill?  Maybe that is the only way to know for sure.