Good afternoon Senator Bark and members of the Senate Economic Growth, Agriculture and Tourism Committee. My name is Michelle Giles, and I am the legislative liaison with the Division of the Ratepayer Advocate. I am here today on behalf of Blossom A. Peretz, the Ratepayer Advocate, who would like me to convey her regret at not being able to personally to address the committee.

The Division of the Ratepayer Advocate strongly supports bill S-1908. Under this legislation, consumer choice for electric and gas will be increased by allowing for additional verification options for consumers to change suppliers. The ‘wet signature’ method alone falls short in serving the needs of New Jersey’s consumers as well as New Jersey’s suppliers. It has proven to be a costly, burdensome and time-consuming method that has served as a roadblock to the goals of encouraging a competitive energy marketplace.

To achieve our goals, the energy marketplace requires diverse methods in place that will provide consumers with more accessibility and flexibility, and at the same time, offer the necessary safeguards to protect them from fraud. There has been some concern in the past over slamming issues with regard to verification options. However, it is important to note that requiring a ‘wet signature’ does not offer a guaranteed safeguard against fraud. In conversations with commission staff in other states, we’ve found that allowing customers to switch telephone providers based on a customer’s ‘wet signature’ is frequently misused by providers who may forge customer names or obtain signatures of unauthorized household members.

Most importantly, because of its costly and cumbersome nature as stated, the ‘wet signature’ option works to deter, rather than enhance, competition -- which is clearly not the goal of the Electric Discount and Energy Competition Act of 1999.

By contrast, allowing for more low-cost verification options, as this legislation does,

will help to stimulate more competition. The new options -- electronic signature, audio recording and third-party verification -- as well as the BPU’s recently enacted Internet sign-up program, are faster, more cost-effective and significantly less cumbersome. They offer consumers unprecedented accessibility and convenience when choosing to switch suppliers.

Currently, there are only 35,000 customers being served by competitive electric suppliers in New Jersey versus 3.1 million customers served by an electric distribution company. While this significant disparity can be attributed mainly to the wholesale marketplace and incentives for suppliers issues, enacting more flexible verification options will help us to continue moving forward in addressing competition issues.

The Ratepayer Advocate also supports the legislation’s inclusion of a ‘Do Not Call’ list -- which will allow residential electric and gas customers to submit their names to the BPU so that electric power suppliers, gas suppliers or private aggregators will not be able to solicit them by phone. The establishment of such a list balances the rights of New Jersey’s consumers to limit the intrusion of these companies with the rights of the companies to market their services. Additionally, we support the bill’s requirement that consumers be educated about the existence of the ‘Do Not Call’ list.

In conclusion, S-1908 provides crucial pro-consumer provisions and will help to encourage more competition among suppliers. We applaud Senator Inverso, Senator Bennett, and the members of the committee for moving forward with this legislation. Thank you.

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