BWS Launches Amnesty Program to Encourage Customers to Pay Their Bills

The Belize Water Services Limited says that customer arrears are piling up to a tune of over two million dollars, as a result of the economic crunch caused by COVID-19 unemployment and income loss.  So now, B.W.S.L. wants to help you to help them by providing you with incentives to pay your water bills.  It’s being done through a residential amnesty program where customers must show proof of economic hardship to qualify.  According to the B.W.S.L., thousands of their customers have been struggling to meet their monthly water bill since April of 2020 and now they have come up with this program to help those individuals whose accounts are three months or more in default. But if you pay your bills early, you can also save. PR Manager Haydon Brown explains the program.

Haydon Brown

Haydon Brown, PR Manager, B.W.S.L.

“We have over eight thousand customers affected in this program that we are targeting. That is the number we are looking at and even prior to this launching of the program we have had about more or less three thousand customers who have come in querying and asking how we can facilitate this exact process and so between them asking and us seeing the need because certainly cash is an important component for our business to continue to run and so part of our duty to help our customers we came up with the amnesty program.   There are two components to it – the persons in arrears component for those persons who are three months and older we are offering a rebate to these individuals of ten percent on every payment they make towards their outstanding arrears. We are also offering for early payment individuals – we have customers who still meet their commitment and we appreciate them very much and we give them five percent which is automatic they don’t have to apply for that. While with the rebate for those in arrears, we are asking them to come in and sit with our customer service representatives who would then walk them through a plan to discuss their capability of making affordable payments and then put them on a plan. The program runs for the next three months.  It runs up to May thirty-first for the next three months and even though it runs up to that point the payment plan can be extended beyond that depends on people’s capability to repay. In terms of the early pay, you are required to pay five days before your due date to be able to get that five percent rebate for those persons who are paying early.”