£66 government energy bills support scheme deducted from my OVO account balance not added?

Your energy bill will also have a reduction of the same amount. 
 

I agree that the bills are confusing in the way the EBSS is described. I suspect they obscure a simple accounting error which results in OVO erroneously benefiting from the government’s monthly EBSS payments, rather than their customers.
 

To work out if you have been overcharged by OVO or not this winter, simply calculate whether there is any difference between what you have actually paid to OVO and the cost of the energy you consumed - for this you need your bank statements, the energy rates and standing charges, add VAT at 5% then any extra charges. You should ignore the EBSS payments paid into your bank account, as well as most of the information in the bills, just get the relevant meter readings for October to March (inclusive, in kWh). When I did this I found we had been overcharged by £239 up to 20th Feb 23.
 

I informed OVO by registered delivery letter but the company did not reply, so I took my case to the Energy Ombudsman. The online complaints procedure is very straightforward, I recommend it. OVO has not disputed the substance of my complaint and I expect a favourable judgement imminently. If more people complain in this way then OVO may eventually accept there has been a systematic error in the way they have handled the EBSS payments. 
 

Good luck 

Out of curiosity 

1. Have you worked out exactly where on the bills your specific simple accounting issue occurred?

2. Was it on one or multiple bills?

3. Gas, electricity, standing charge, vat, or something else? 

I checked mine and they were fine, so i assume this is something specific to your account? 

1. No. I think more information would be needed.
2. Having established that recent bills have a tenuous relationship with reality, I cannot answer this without more information.
3. What is the question?

From just two observations, it is no more reasonable to conclude that our experience was specific to us, than it would be to conclude that it happened to everyone except you. More data is needed.

3. Where  is the error roughly, does it look like the gas portion, electricity portion etc?

There is a breakdown on the bills so i just assumed, perhaps wrongly, it would be easy to spot any differences with your separate detailed calculations. 

I only ask in case it helps others. 

If anyone cares to check (I just did), there are some 36 acknowledgements on this thread alone that the process albeit confusing is correct. There may be a handful of accounts which need intervention but given that the majority of people who have no problem don’t post here, that suggests that the system worked out in the end.

I think that OVO have learned a lesson regarding presenting this type of support package but thankfully it is finished.

I have read this thread and seems that the moderators are saying that the EBSS payments are supposed to be subtracted from the electricity charges, refunded to the account holders bank account and subtracted from the direct debit amount that has been paid.. Correct? 

No, that’s not quite right. Those payments (seems a while ago now) were simply deducted from your energy charges and then refunded to your bank (if paying by direct debit). There was no reduction of direct debit in that case.

Well in my case the money was refunded to my account but then applied against my direct debit payment. I paid £107.15 then -£67.00 was applied to it and OVO now says that I only made a £40.15 payment. So I called in to the call centre and they told me that is exactly what is supposed to happen and wouldn’t even let me lodge a complaint to contest this.

I had to call citizen advice just so that I could even get to the complaints department.. They then proceeded to tell me that this was exactly what the government had in mind for the discount. To essentially just transfer £67.00 of the money I just paid to OVO back and not apply any of it to my actual energy bill. Now I’m just trying to switch providers before OVO finds some new way to extort money from me but they are objecting to the switch because I have this balance of all of these EBSS payments that were subtracted from my direct debit payments without my knowledge.