UPDATE 9/13/16 11:00PM: NCIS has a new issue.
According to a spokesman, last week’s problems with the new NCIS billing and customer service system for Seattle City Light and Seattle Public Utilities have been resolved.
SCL spokesman Scott Thomsen told me in an email, “we did find a coding error in a script that was written to pull data and send bill notifications to any inactive accounts that still had a balance. That error has been fixed.”
That error was responsible for both problems that arose when the new system was launched last week: some customers received multiple email notifications, and some had access to other customers’ bills. The latter issue raised potential privacy issues, and the NCIS team temporarily suspended access to the online bill-payment system last week while they investigated the issue.
According to Thomsen, now that the error has been found and fixed, the utilities are sending daily batches of bills to the online bill-payment vendor as originally planned, and the backlog of online bills generated before the fix was rolled out has been caught up. The utilities sent out over 81,000 “e-bills” in the past week.
Thomsen said that there are no other outstanding issues being investigated at this point.