Dubai Housing Fee
From Arabian Business....
A nasty fright this week opening my monthly water and electricity bill. It's gone from the usual AED150 to something horribly close to AED700, a rise of more than 400 percent. Some mistake? The patient lady on the telephone at DEWA - Dubai's water and electricity authority - explains it is the newly added Housing Fee, which everyone in Dubai should have been paying since its inception in early 2005.
The reason some people are only starting to pay it now is because the process of adding everyone's name to the relevant database has been a long and painstaking one, she said. The Housing Fee, for those of you still not acquainted with it - and judging from internet forums for Dubai expatriates, that is quite a lot of people - is either an annual five percent of your rent, or one percent of the property's purchase price, payable monthly.
Still indignant at the sudden hike in the bill, I asked if people could expect a backdated bill for all the months they hadn't been paying, through no fault of their own. "Yes," was the answer. Of course, the lady on the phone wasn't an official spokeswoman for DEWA, she was a call centre operative trained to answer customer queries.
When I called back again, the man who answered said there would be no backdated bills. Efforts to get hold of DEWA spokesperson proper have proved about as fruitful as catching a Mossad secret agent. Can anyone clarify the situation? Because on top of speeding fines, SALIK penalties (which are essentially a tax on forgetfulness), parking fines, property service fees and maintenance charges, a backdated bill for housing fees (for road cleaning and public bins, the lady on the phone explained) would be highly unwelcome at the moment.