Origin Energy has apologised for failing to meet its “regulatory obligations” after it was fined $17.6m for breaching Victoria’s energy rules and affecting nearly 670,000 customers, including some on life support.
In the Victorian supreme court, Origin admitted to not providing adequate “best offer” messaging to more than 655,000 customers, and failing to provide adequate support to another 6,806 who were experiencing “payment difficulty”.
The company also admitted to overcharging 78 customers, recovering undercharged amounts from 411 customers beyond a four-month back-billing limit, and failing to maintain information on 10 customers undergoing life support.
The breaches took place between December 2021 and May 2023, according to the judgment handed down on Friday.
The Victorian Essential Services Commission took Origin to court after discovering the non-compliance.
Its chairperson and commissioner, Gerard Brody, said the regulator pushed for “significant penalties” to “ensure the cost of breaking consumer protection rules cannot be written off as a cost of doing business”.
“We wanted the penalty to send a message about the importance of these rules, and we’re pleased these record penalties have done that,” Brody said on Saturday.
The commission’s statement said the fine was the “largest financial penalty for breaches of Victoria’s energy rules in the state’s history”.
“While today’s decision will be felt most directly by Origin, it will reverberate in the boardrooms of all energy retailers,” Brody said.
In his judgment, Justice Michael Osborne acknowledged Origin had taken steps to improve its record-keeping but said the penalty still needed to have “sufficient sting in it”.
He said if the court did not impose penalties of “sufficient magnitude”, there was a risk other energy retailers who were complying with all relevant obligations could drop their standards to save on costs.
“A penalty of sufficient size is warranted to deter Origin, and equally important, others like Origin, from transgressing such prohibitions, particularly where the consequence of transgression is financial harm to the consumer and correlative gain to the retailer,” he said.
In addition to the financial penalty, the court ordered Origin to implement additional quality assurance measures, run additional compliance training for staff and publish public notices about its contraventions in major Melbourne newspapers.
The company was also ordered to pay the Essential Services Commission’s legal costs.
Origin’s executive general manager, Jon Briskin, apologised for the breaches.
“We are sorry we didn’t meet our regulatory obligations for these customers, and we are committed to doing better with significant resources dedicated towards improving compliance performance,” he said in a statement.
“We self-reported most of the breaches to the regulator, cooperated fully with their investigations and take full responsibility for all of the breaches before the court.”
Briskin said many of the breaches were caused by “human error” or errors in Origin’s “legacy customer service platform” and that the company had a new, improved system for electricity and gas customers.
“Customers suffered no or limited loss or damage, and we remediated affected customers where appropriate,” he said.
In January, the Essential Services Commission fined Origin $1.6m for sharing family violence victims’ private details without their consent and for chasing other survivors for unpaid power bills.
Between June 2021 and March 2024, Origin was found to have disclosed confidential information of 16 family violence-affected customers without their consent 21 times, and took debt recovery action against another 38 customers without considering the potential effect on them.
– with Australian Associated Press
