The Supreme Court ruled that the Energy Regulatory Commission (ERC) can require consumers to pay bill deposits as security for their electric bills, affirming it as a valid exercise of the ERC’s rate-fixing power to ensure the economic viability of electricity distributors.
The SC En Banc, through Senior Associate Justice Marvic Leonen, denied the petition of Neri Colmenares et al. challenging the ERC’s authority to allow distribution utilities (DUs) to collect bill deposits from their consumers.
The ERC promulgated the Magna Carta for Residential Electric Consumers in 2004, which required residential consumers to pay bill deposits as guaranty for their electricity payments.
The deposit amount is equivalent to the estimated billing for one month and can be used to pay overdue bills. Deposits earn annual interest based on the Landbank of the Philippines’ savings account rates, and the interest is credited to a customer’s account each year. Customers are also entitled to a refund of their deposit after terminating their electricity service.
The ERC later issued guidelines to operationalize the collection and refund of bill deposits.
In 2018, the ERC published the draft “Rules to Govern the Monitoring and Reporting Process of Bill Deposits” and scheduled focus group discussions for comments.
In 2019, Colmenares et al. filed their petition before the SC, arguing that the bill deposit requirement lacked adequate regulations. However, the SC denied their petition for being premature, the Court’s Public Information Office said in a press release Jan. 27.
The SC emphasized that judicial review requires an actual and completed government action that adversely affects the petitioners. Since the ERC’s Rules on Bill Deposits are still under development, there is no final act to challenge.
“It is not our function to issue an advisory opinion on the questions of policy and regulations of administrative agencies. It is premature for this Court to intervene in the delicate exercise of the ERC’s rate-fixing functions since it has yet to finalize the rules on bill deposits and the more specific mechanisms for its implementation,” the SC ruled. ||
