Jon Wezner is a Senior Analyst with Azavar Government Solutions. He possesses a comprehensive background in data analysis, strategic planning and training derived from conducting domestic and global operations in the United States, Asia and the Middle East.
In this interview, we learn how analysts with Azavar Government Solutions are helping municipalities identify opportunities for revenue enhancement within their natural gas and water utilities. We also discuss how various loopholes have been opened over the years due to the different complexities within the natural gas industry.
Question: Could describe what you typically do as an analyst on a day-to-day basis?
Answer: I'm responsible for the natural gas, the water audit and most recently the Cook County Project. These all can vary in depth, from a very simple address audit, which is our bread and butter, to a very complex, in-depth analysis of some financial information that a community or utility provider provides to us. On any given day, my duties can vary greatly but they're typically concentrated in both natural gas and water.
Question: Since your focus is natural gas and water, what makes those two realms unique as compared to other focus areas such as sales tax or telecom or cable?
Answer: Not every house is going to have natural gas. However, for the vast majority of homes that you deal with the utility provider, those homes are going to have electricity and running water.
But determining an exception, an address that is not remitting to the community as an actual natural gas user, is a little bit more difficult. Therefore, it goes a little bit beyond just identifying an address that isn’t remitting. It also encompasses identifying an address that is not remitting, and also proving that it's a natural gas user.
Question: What are gas master meters and how do they impact your work?
Answer: A master meter is a meter that encompasses a few different units within a premise. One of the things we do when we identify a specific premise with a utility provider like Nicor or North Shore Gas or MidAmerican, is we'll typically have a list of units within that premise that are electricity consumption users or have running water.
Then we know all these different units and occasionally, the provider, will come back and say, we have one address for this unit for two address unit or something along that line. Then, we have to go through the analysis of determining if that one meter is actually providing natural gas or monitoring the natural gas consumption of all the different premises or all the different units within that premise.
Question: Are there communities that only have electric?
Answer: Typically, at least some premises will have natural gas. However, there are a lot of premises that are electric only where all the units within a certain building will only have electricity as their primary source of energy. Then we have to go through a couple of different proprietary methods in order to determine if a large premise is only using electricity or if they’re using natural gas as well.
Question: Based on your experience, are you able to identify more errors than a municipality would by themselves?
Answer: I'd like to believe that the municipality has done their absolute best job possible before they decide to bring us on. Often they just don’t have the resources or have enough personnel to do what we do. In addition, some municipalities only have people that are working part time, so it's a little bit more difficult for them to have the expertise that we bring to the table.
Because of our extensive background and experience, we have a much better idea of the different indicators or flags to look for that would show that something might be amiss. I also think that we are really good at complementing communities that are already doing extraordinarily well. We're really good at helping them maximize their benefits from all different types of services.
Question: When you’re working with a municipality are you able to assist in computation of gross revenue that they may be missing out on?
Answer: Yes, absolutely. One of the projects that I worked on was with a specific utility provider in the northwest part of the state. Unlike some of the other providers, when we first began the audit, they were very cooperative, actually extremely cooperative. Often, many utility providers will be a little bit more hesitant.
They completely opened their books up to us and they were definitely on the same page as the community. They just wanted to make sure everything was right. The community was obviously very happy about that and the utility provider worked very closely with us in a very cooperative fashion.
In doing so, we looked at gross revenue down to a single transaction level; every single transaction that had occurred within that community over the course of several years. Together in cooperation with the utility provider, we were able to fix every single possible area.
It was a great accomplishment and the community was very pleased with the outcome, as was the utility provider. 99 times out of a hundred they just want to do what's right and just want to make sure that their clients or the community are getting everything they deserve.
Question: Do you find that there are certain prevalent issues that you see in water and natural gas that kind of repeat themselves? Is it the same for both natural gas and water?
Answer: It's actually a little bit different, only because of the histories of the two different areas we're talking about. Natural gas has gone through a lot of different phases of regulation in the past few decades. There have been a number of proposed governmental efforts that have been attempted and then retracted.
All these different regulations and deregulations, as well as technology changes within the industry have been constant. Keep in mind that when natural gas first started, it was provided by the community at the community level. Now people have an opportunity to purchase natural gas even out of state lines and just have it piped into them.
Because of all these different complexities in the natural gas industry, there are many different loopholes that have opened up over the years. Therefore, one of the things I did prior to coming to Azavar was I worked with Goldman Sachs in the sanctions and control room. There we oversaw a lot of loophole areas to make sure that we weren't getting out of a white zone or gray zone and then to a red zone.
Taking that experience and adding it to Azavar, I can kind of see when someone is playing with an area where they are using a loophole that could be closed and we can present that information to the community and give them the insight and the numbers to decide what they want to do. Our client can choose to be a little bit more stringent with how they control the regulations within their community or not.
That knowledge can give the community a big advantage with natural gas. On the water side, it's a little bit less regulated and it's not really as loophole-prevalent of an environment.
Question: How have improvements in technology changed your day-to-day responsibilities within natural gas and water? Has technology helped you do your job better?
Answer: Azavar does leverage some very unique and proprietary technological components that we use to help our audit. Although we haven’t seen dramatic technological changes within the several years that I have been here at Azavar, the difference in what we're able to do now versus what we're able to do when we very first began is dramatic.
At this point, we are leveraging SQL databases with our proprietary software that does a lot of the in-depth analysis work for us. In addition, we have another component to the company on the tax side that their specialty is software development.
Having them right next to us within the same office and having a great working relationship with them, we're able to leverage some of the best coding minds available to development solutions to our clients’ problems. For example, if two databases aren't communicating very well, our software development team can often find a solution that allows us to merge these data sources and create some valuable insights for our customers.
