OVO Energy is set to pay £8.9million to Ofgem after it overcharged and undercharged customers and gave others the wrong information.
The various errors took place over five years up until this month due to issues with its IT systems.
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Ofgem said the supplier sent inaccurate yearly statements to more than 500,000 customers between July 2015 and February 2018.
Around 10,000 customers were not given statements of renewal terms or moved to new tariffs when their existing tariffs ended.
Roughly 8,000 customers also paid more than the prepayment meter cap after OVO failed to move them to a new tariff after their previous one ended.
Meanwhile, 17,500 prepayment meter customers weren’t charged at the correct regional level of the prepayment meter cap.
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As a result, OVO has agreed to pay the £8.9million to Ofgem’s voluntary redress fund.
The energy supplier said all overcharged customers have already been refunded, but didn’t specify how many this applied to nor how much they received on average.
We’ve also asked whether it recommends previous customers to get in touch in case they’re due refunds too, but we haven’t heard back yet.
OVO said it has written off all the amounts to customers who’d been undercharged.
Anthony Pygram, director of conduct and enforcement at Ofgem, said OVO “did not prioritise” fixing these issues for customers while its business was expanding.
He said: “OVO Energy billed a number of its customers incorrectly and issued them with inaccurate information.
“Our enforcement action sends a strong message that suppliers must get basic services right for all their customers.”
In a statement, OVO said: “OVO Energy holds itself to high standards, but we have not always got it right.
“We accept Ofgem’s findings of issues regarding estimation processes, information formatting and pricing errors.”
In a separate Ofgem announcement today, Utility Warehouse has been ordered to pay £650,000 for overcharging thousands of customers.
And in December, energy firm iSupply was fined £1.5million after overcharging thousands of customers.
While earlier this month, three energy companies agreed to pay out £10.5million after more than one million customers were left without power.
