Los Angeles City Attorney Mike Feuer on Friday announced that his office has filed a civil lawsuit against Price Waterhouse Coopers (PWC) alleging the company fraudulently misrepresented its capabilities to implement a new billing system for the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power (DWP) in order to secure a $70 million city contract that it subsequently failed to deliver.

The complaint alleges that as a result of the company’s lack of skills and experience to perform the work in the contract, the DWP’s system was unable to properly calculate and bill tens of thousands of customers, resulting in the loss of hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue.

In 2009, the DWP issued a request for proposals (RFP) in an effort to modernize its nearly 40-year-old customer care and billing system. The complaint alleges that PWC intentionally misrepresented and failed to disclose important facts in its response to the RFP in order to secure the contract. Specifically, the complaint alleges PWC overstated its knowledge, expertise and skills necessary to convert the DWP’s current billing system and implement a new software platform for the department’s customers.

The complaint also alleges that PWC misled the DWP by stating it had a “100 percent success rate” in implementing the billing system and falsely touting the success of similar work performed for the Cleveland Water Department. In fact, PWC’s failure at Cleveland Water caused the company to incur severe financial losses as a result of improper billing of customers.

In addition to allegedly inducing the DWP to reward the contract to PWC, the company subsequently failed to successfully perform several of the key tasks it was required to perform under its contract, including successfully completing critical reports and customer billing conversion programs necessary for the billing system, officials said.

As a result of PWC’s alleged misconduct, the complaint alleges 11.25 percent of DWP’s meters were rendered unable to function and the DWP was unable to bill approximately 180,000 of its customers.