A weighty and expensive issue

What happened?

A complainant approached us about an issue they were having with Australia Post’s automatic parcel scanning system, also known as the Dimension Weight Scanning system (DWS). The DWS system is used for business customers and scans the weight and dimensions of parcels as they pass through the machine to verify the correct postage amount has been paid.

The complainant told us they believed they were being frequently overcharged by a DWS system error, which was something we had heard from others.

What did we do?

We investigated the complaint with Australia Post, which ultimately maintained that the underpayments for postage detected by the DWS system were valid. However, Australia Post did acknowledge that the complainant had been raising this issue with them for quite some time and that it was partially at fault for not investigating earlier. As such, it was unable to verify any of the customer’s claims given the period of time that had passed.

Australia Post also discovered that there was potentially an issue with how the complainant’s business account had initially been set up. It said this may have resulted in the complainant incorrectly being charged the higher amount for postage.

Outcome of our inquiry

As a result of this, Australia Post made the decision to credit the complainant’s business account by $7,444.23, clearing all debts from their account.