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SSE agrees to pay Ofgem £1m following inaccurate statements
Scottish energy giant SSE has agreed to pay £1m to the Office of Gas and Electricity Markets' consumer redress fund after providing "inaccurate and misleading information" to pre-payment meter customers in their annual statements.
Ofgem launched its investigation into the FTSE 100 firm after it reported the issue to the regulator back in November.
The investigation found that SSE had sent out as many as 1.15m inaccurate annual statements to 580,000 pre-payment meter customers between June 2014 and September 2015 as a result of an "IT coding error" that contained incorrect information on the alternative and cheaper tariff available to customers and inaccurate estimates of how much they could save annually by switching to them.
Some statements also overestimated the annual savings the customers could make by changing their pre-payment meter to a standard credit meter paying by direct debit.
Whilst Ofgem said the level of harm was low as "only a small proportion" of customers could or would have acted on the information by switching, its investigation found that SSE failed to act promptly to "put things right", by not identifying the issue at an early stage and by not escalating action to address it or putting in place appropriate remedial actions.
SSE will pay £1m into Ofgem's consumer redress fund administered by the Energy Savings Trust, which supports consumers in vulnerable situations.