Where’s My Rebate?
I started writing this at the end of June, then other issues caused me to stray from the draft of this post.
Anyway the VI Energy Office has been advertising on the radio that they will give up to $5000 to people buying a new energy efficient vehicle. Wow! That’s a chunk of change!
They have been giving rebates on appliances, even televisions for quite a while, so when we needed a washing machine for SunDog House, we chose one with a good energy star rating and were promised a $200 rebate. Cool!
We went out to Frederiksted with the paperwork to apply for the rebate and were told that we’d receive our check in “10-12 weeks”. This was February 19.
However, since I have lived here 16 years, I knew I needed to make sure that would happen. So I kept a copy of the application with the name, phone number and extension of the woman in charge, in case the time went by and we didn’t get the money. I put it in a prominent place so it wouldn’t get lost in the black hole.
After 12 weeks (the end of May), we still hadn’t received our rebate. So I called.
“Oh, the checks have been delayed, the next batch will go out at the beginning of June,” said the nice lady. She took a few minutes to look up may application and found that it had been approved.
So we waited, and at the end of June I called back. The nice lady was apologetic and said that she didn’t know when we’d get our check but she’d look into it and get back to me.
Riiiight…..
I’d probably still be waiting for her call if I hadn’t called back. By this time I was pretty irate. I did let her know that I would be contacting the inspector general of the federal DOE to let him/her know that the VI Energy office was spending money to advertise rebates, but then taking an inordinate amount of time to send them out.
She said the next batch would go out at the beginning of July.
We finally got ours then. But I still contacted the inspector general of the federal DOE through their website.
August 2nd, 2010 at 10:54 am
I have always found working with the government at any level a pleasure and a model of efficiency.
Wonder how many man hours were tired up in that refund? I bet it was $1000 of some poor slob’s tax money and it got handled down to $200.
August 4th, 2010 at 11:08 am
I applied yesterday. Supposedly by December.
we’ll see
August 5th, 2010 at 4:18 pm
The ways of the local bureaucracy here are hard to fathom sometimes. I mean, how hard is it to write a check — unless of course you already used the money for something else, like in a ponzi scheme.
August 11th, 2010 at 11:57 am
Right, Don, and that’s why I contacted the federal inspector general. Those are federal funds not being distributed in a timely manner.