The City of Johannesburg (CoJ) has warned that it will soon blacklist thousands of defaulting residential property owners and businesses to recoup more than R40-billion in municipal debt.

Johannesburg's has an overall municipal debt of more than R52-billion, which it intends to curb with the aggressive credit control campaign. It also intends to invoke its credit control and debt collection policy by reporting defaulting payers to appropriate credit bureaus.

“Business and domestic customers who perpetually default will soon be targeted by our specialised team as part of the city’s aggressive credit control campaign. These are individual businesses and households whose municipal accounts are in arrears for more than 61 days. These steps are necessary, as the city also has bills to pay like [utilities] Eskom and Rand Water,” says CoJ CFO Tebogo Moraka.

The CoJ has set up a specialised revenue collection team, which will specifically target these defaulting customers across the city, and try to recoup the monies owed to the city. Residents who are in arrears with their municipal accounts and who have not made arrangements for settling their bills run the risk of being blacklisted, he says.

“These customers are those who would have gone through all the city’s processes to get them to pay their debt, but simply ignored all communication from the city.

“The city would have issued them with pre-termination notices informing them of the outstanding arrears and giving them enough time, of 14 days, to approach the city and settle their debt. The city would have also sent them final demand notices, sent SMSes and called them to remind them to urgently settle their accounts without success,” Moraka points out.

He says the CoJ has no choice but to hand over these perpetual defaulters to the specialised revenue collection team to begin the process of blacklisting them.

Additionally, illegal connection of services will be considered a serious offence and such connections will be removed to terminate the service immediately, he adds.

All property owners who are struggling to service their accounts for various reasons should approach the city to avoid being cut off by making payment arrangement and signing an acknowledgement of debt, Moraka advises.