Public Utilities and the Statute of Limitations: Iowa Law Leaves Consumers in the Dark

Iowa’s code and administrative rules do not clearly prohibit public utilities from denying service to consumers who have unpaid bills on which the statute of limitations has run. This ambiguity allows utilities to engage in coercive debt-collection practices that undermine the principles of fairness and justice embedded in Iowa’s statute of limitations, even though the state agency that regulates utilities has declared in administrative proceedings that utilities may not deny service to consumers who have time-barred debts. I argue that the agency should issue a rule prohibiting utilities from using service-denial threats to collect debts that are more than five years old.