The Ombudsman announced the completion of a direct investigation into the arrangement for payment of water charges for the common areas and vacant units in public housing estates. The direct investigation report shows that water charges for common areas and vacant residential units in public housing estates are paid to the Water Supplies Department (“WSD”) by the Housing Department (“HD”) on behalf of the Hong Kong Housing Authority.
However, in one complaint case handled by the Office, it was found that HD’s property services agent in a public housing estate had sent the water bill for the vacancy period of a residential unit to the tenant who subsequently took up that unit for him to pay. The Office has also noticed that in a number of public housing estates, there were long-standing default payments in the water accounts payable by HD, but WSD just failed to address the problem. Moreover, the confusing arrangement between HD and WSD regarding change of consumer ship of residential and non-residential units has caused some outstanding payments to be completely written off, resulting in loss of public revenue.
This direct investigation has revealed impropriety on the part of these two departments in causing administrative confusion as noted above. To address the inadequacies of HD and WSD, the Office has made five recommendations for improvement.
The Ombudsman further announced the completion of a direct investigation into the Food and Environmental Hygiene Department (“FEHD”)’s criteria for publicising the list of traders involved after issuing a Food Safety Order. The focus of this direct investigation was on the reasons for FEHD’s varied decisions whether or not to publicise the respective lists of traders involved after issuing its three Food Safety Orders regarding substandard cooking oils during the period September - November 2014.
Source: Office of the Ombudsman Hong Kong, China
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