Missing bills, Higher bills. Utility glitch affects 32,000.

Billing problems with at least 32,000 utility accounts across Hampton Roads mean some people haven’t received a water and sewer bill for months, while others claim excessive increases.

The problems started after the regional billing cooperative switched to new software last year.

Affected customers are in Norfolk, Virginia Beach, Chesapeake and the Peninsula. As of earlier this month, about 5,700 had not received bills since the software was implemented in July, say officials with the Hampton Roads Sanitation District, which runs the regional billing service.

Some customers have complained of bills that were two, three and four times as high as usual. Officials with the Sanitation District and Virginia Beach say people may have received larger-than-expected bills covering multiple billing periods. The agency is arranging plans with those residents to spread payments across several months.

“We’re working hard to get it fixed,” said Ted Henifin, the district’s

general manager. “To date, we have not found anything wrong with the system that calculates your bill.”

It is unclear what the problem is.

Stefania Barnard, a Chesapeake mother, said she got a bill of $110.21 in October, a typical amount. Barnard’s January bill was $382.05.

She said Chesapeake and the Sanitation District gave her multiple reasons for the increase , including a water leak and an inaccurate meter reading .

Eventually, her bill was lowered by about $150, but she maintains she was overbilled by $80.

“And I’m probably going to have to eat that,” she said. “It’s very, very frustrating. I don’t care whose fault it is. I just want to pay for the water I use.”

Henifin denies that problems with the software have caused the billing issues. Chesapeake City Manager William Harrell said it is obvious there was “inadequate testing” before the new system was put into place.

“A breakdown of $10 or $12, I think we’d overlook,” said Chesapeake Councilman John de Triquet, whose Western Branch neighbors have experienced problems. “It’s a fairly substantial breakdown when bills double.”

The regional cooperative billing group, Hampton Roads Utility Billing Service, is a subsidiary of the Sanitation District. The group handles many cities’ billing services for drinking water and sewer maintenance and treatment.

As soon as the new software was used , “it became obvious that something was amiss,” Chesapeake Public Utilities Director J.K. Walski wrote in a memo Monday. Customers began calling with more questions. Errors were kicking certain bills out of the system.

As long as the error remained, Walski wrote, the bills were not sent. But amounts continued to accumulate, he said.

“We were perplexed,” Harrell said.

Susan Lovette of Chesapeake was also confused. Lovette noticed her usual bill of about $110 jump to $191 in January.

“It was the highest one I had ever gotten,” said Lovette, who has lived in the same home for 24 years. “So I started questioning it.”

Her neighbors noticed problems, too. So did people at church and work.

Lovette gathered the names of 50 people who didn’t get a bill or ended up with an unusually high notice.

“None of it seems right,” she said.

Chesapeake officials may look for a way out of the regional billing cooperative, Walski wrote in the memo.

Henifin said his agency has been authorized to spend up to $100,000 for a new project manager to oversee the implementation of the software, which has already cost $13 million to buy and get up and running.

According to Henifin, the agency has identified billing problems with about 5,000 accounts in Virginia Beach, 3,500 in Norfolk, and 2,000 each in Chesapeake in Portsmouth. There are problems with about 13,000 accounts in Peninsula communities, with exception to Williamsburg, Henifin said.

Everything is going fine with “94 percent of our bills, which sounds pretty good,” Henifin told the Chesapeake City Council this week. “When you’re dealing with 460,000 accounts, we’ve got about 32,000 accounts that we’re still struggling to get straight.”

“To date, we have not found anything wrong with the way the system calculates your bill,” Henifin added.

The account problems do not appear to have hit Suffolk, which joined the billing service last year, said Al Moore, the city’s director of public utilities.

Hundreds of Suffolk homeowners complained about high utility bills last fall, but those increases were due largely to water consumption, Moore said, as well as a rate increase, a new wastewater treatment fee and an extended billing cycle.

Lovette knows her bill is wrong. She paid $120 of her $191 bill and wrote that she was not paying the rest .

“I’m not planning on paying that extra $70,” she said.

 Staff writers Deirdre Fernandes, Dave Forster and Meghan Hoyer contributed to this report.

 Mike Saewitz, (757) 222-5207, mike.saewitz@pilotonline.com