About 3,000 people have called Irish Water every day since the beginning of the month to change address details so refund cheques can be processed.
All told 28,000 people have updated their contact details with the utility but it has warned that tens of thousands of others who need to change their details have just one more week to do so if their money is to be refunded as fast as possible.
Irish Water’s head of customer operations Eamon Gallen said he expected legislation paving the way for refunds to pass soon: “That is why we are appealing to customers who have moved and have not already done so to contact us by the November 17th.”
He said Irish Water was set to issue almost one million refund cheques and stressed that it wanted to ensure cheques go to the right people at the right address.
“Based on CSO data we can estimate how many people may have moved since domestic billing was suspended. We know that those who sold a house will have informed us as they were required to under law to confirm that there were no bills outstanding on their property, but exactly the number of those renting who paid domestic water charges and have since moved is less clear.”
He said it was “inevitable given the volume and the fact that we have not issued bills in almost 18 months that our contact details for some customers will need to be updated. If people do not contact us we will send the cheque to the last address on file for the account holder.”
The refunds section on the website water.ie/refunds has had almost 160,000 hits over the past ten days as customers have sought information on different aspects of the process.
In addition almost 35,000 customers logged into the online account management service to check that their contact details are correct and to see how much they paid in domestic water charges.
In addition to the website people can make contact with Irish Water to change their address by calling 1850 448 448.
