Retail Supplier To Pay $49,000 Under Settlement With Pennsylvania PUC Staff

All American Power and Gas PA, LLC would pay $49,000 under a settlement with the Pennsylvania PUC's Bureau of Investigation and Enforcement (I&E) to resolve alleged instances of slamming by a third-party vendor retained by All American Power and Gas

The settlement states that, since November of 2023, the Pennsylvania Public Utility Commission’s Bureau of Consumer Services (BCS) has received approximately seventy (70) complaints from individuals who claim that their electricity supplier was switched without authorization to All American

Through its communications with All American, BCS discovered that All American first became aware of what the settlement calls "the fraudulent enrollments" during the second week of January 2024, on or about January 8, 2024.

All American suspended the vendor's marketing activities on or about January 9, 2024 -- the next day. All American terminated the vendor's contract on January 15, 2024.

The settlement states that All American indicated that the erroneous enrollments in question occurred as a result of an internal vendor error where the customer’s account number was entered incorrectly by a vendor's agent during the enrollment process.

All American indicated that it had cancelled the accounts in question and offered the customers of those accounts a refund, "based upon the difference of the price of the customer’s previous supplier’s rate."

The settlement states, "After reviewing the Data Request response, BCS determined that the remedies All American made in an attempt to correct the slamming situation were not in compliance with 52 Pa. Code § 57.177(b), which requires complete refunds to these customers if the customers’ allegations are substantiated and raised within the first two billing periods following the change of the EGS. Since being alerted of the non-compliance mentioned above, All American has provided complete refunds of supplier charges to the customers whose enrollments were processed." [emphasis added]

All American has also strengthened its verification procedures by contacting newly enrolled customers via telephone to confirm the legitimacy of the enrollment before new sales are processed.

In a statement filed with the PUC in support of the settlement, All American states, "All American has fully cooperated with the investigation, and also conducted its own internal investigation of this matter, both before and after the opening of I&E’s investigation".

"Upon investigating the issue, All American determined that errors were made by the vendor when transferring customer account information into the flat files used for enrollment processing. American then worked with the vendor to identify all potential incorrect enrollments that were submitted by the vendor, and proactively took steps to cancel those enrollments before they were processed by the utility," All American said in the statement

All American noted that, upon learning of the alleged violations, All American voluntarily ceased all marketing in Pennsylvania pending revisions to its marketing policies and procedures to improve its vendor screening, technologies used for customer enrollments, and sales quality assurance requirements

"All American sincerely regrets that its third party marketing vendor’s errors caused the unauthorized enrollments. All American fully cooperated with I&E’s investigation of the incident and took immediate remedial action in response to the incident, as reflected in the Settlement. All American did not authorize the vendor’s actions and was not aware of the errors until receiving the first complaints. All American then acted quickly to remove the vendor from enrollment activities, and ensured that every affected customer’s enrollment was cancelled," All American stated

Docket No. M-2025-3048113