During the six months that the Program to Support the Elimination of Electricity Fraud (PAEF) has been in existence, there have been 3,114 illegal connections detected out of 21,605 inspections. As a result, 68 people have been charged and sent to court. Army Lieutenant Colonel Expedy Pou, head of the Electricity Police, says that in the areas where fraud has been detected the situation has been corrected in 90% of the cases. He reported that in the Invivienda sector, a gang that tampered with electric meters and made illegal connections has been broken up and their ladders and wires confiscated. Currently there are 31 groups of Electricity Police working across the Dominican Republic. The power distributors claim that there are over 200,000 illegal connections to the national energy system.
Since privatization of the system, Dominican consumers pay the highest cost of power in the Americas. The government funded the electricity police after the power companies complained they could not reduce the number of illegal connections. In practice, those who pay for the service end up paying for those who do not.
When privatization was sold to Dominicans as a good idea, the main argument was that the companies would replicate the telephone company?s success in getting everyone to pay for the public service, and thus power bills would be reduced not increased.