VIDALIA — The City of Vidalia may have underbilled hundreds of thousands of dollars in utility services to its largest customers.

The discrepancy was discovered in the wake of the resignation of the former city accountant, City Attorney Scott McLemore said.

“Essentially, when we were transitioning around some duties, we noticed that some of the billing for our manually billed customers — which are larger, industrial customers — may have been done incorrectly, and it had been for a period of time,” McLemore said. “We are going through and recalculating all of those bills back to where we know they were calculated right.”

While Vidalia residential and commercial customers are billed automatically with a computer-generated bill after meter reading based on actual usage, the city’s utility rate sheet says bills for industrial and large industrial customers are determined by whichever is higher, the customer’s current demand or 75 percent of the highest demand in the last 11 months.

The extent to which the underbilling was done is unknown at this time, McLemore said, but residential and regular commercial customers aren’t affected. The city only has five customers who qualify for industrial or large industrial billing.

“We only manually bill a handful, and our thought was we were going to calculate everything, get (the Louisiana Energy & Power Authority) to check it for us since they help us with power cost adjustment, and then we would actually see what was hanging out there,” McLemore said.

“Louisiana law does not allow municipalities to transfer items of value without being compensated, so we will need to ultimately collect the amounts owed. However, we did not feel that it would be fair to the customer to have to come up with the full amount all at once. The thought was that the town could possibly spread the amounts due over a period of time so as to not disrupt the customers’ ordinary course of business. ”

In a March 30 email to Mayor Hyram Copeland, Certified Public Accountant Elizabeth Tanner said she had completed a recalculation of the city’s largest industrial client — BASF — for the last 11 months, and the total loss for the city at that time was approximately $197,000.

That amount was much lower than a previous estimate, Tanner wrote in the email.

“BASF is the largest user, so I do not expect the other industrial customers to be anywhere near that amount,” she wrote.

McLemore said city officials have been trying to touch base with the affected customers in the past week.

“Obviously, we have got to sit down with them and address whatever their concerns would be,” he said. “Hopefully, we can get it all worked out where it is not as huge of a deal as it seems. We want to make sure we work with everybody and make sure it gets done right.”

Former City Accountant Ashley Anderson resigned in mid-March after an investigation initiated by the Vidalia Board of Aldermen into what city officials have termed “unauthorized contractor payments” that had been made. While officials have been reluctant to discuss further the nature of those payments, they have said the payments were discovered through the city’s checks and balances system, which has since been changed to ensure the problem does not happen again.