What's the strangest billing error you've ever found? I'll go first. A shopping center in Charlotte on Duke Energy was being billed for TWO meters on one account. They had one physical meter but the billing system had two meter IDs assigned to the account, both recording the same usage. The client was literally paying double for their electricity and had been for 4 years. Nobody noticed because the total bill amount didn't look unreasonable for a shopping center — it just looked like a high bill, not a double bill. Recovery was $189,000.
Weirdest error I've ever found
That's wild. Mine: a cold storage facility in Macon on Georgia Power was being billed on a rate schedule that had been discontinued 6 years earlier. The rate was still in the billing system even though it had been removed from the tariff. The discontinued rate was about 22% more expensive than the replacement rate. Georgia Power had to manually calculate the refund because their system couldn't generate a comparison to a rate that no longer existed. $74,000 recovery.
I found a commercial account in Atlanta where the utility was billing the customer for street lighting. Not the parking lot lights — actual city street lights on the public road adjacent to the property. Somehow the street light circuit got assigned to the commercial customer's account instead of the city's account. The customer had been paying for city street lights for 7 years. Georgia Power refunded $41,000 and was genuinely embarrassed.
These are amazing. Mine's less dramatic but still weird: a client in New Jersey had two PSE&G accounts for the same building — one for the east half and one for the west half. The building was built as two separate structures in the 1960s and later connected. Both meters were still active even though the internal wall was removed 20 years ago. Consolidating to one meter and one account saved $600/month in duplicate customer charges and minimum demand charges.
These stories are why I love this forum. You can't make this stuff up.