Funny story there.

I once moved in to a property development where the development collectively paid for water access.

The water was turned on for the developers during construction, but when construction was finished, the city closed the account without remembering to transfer to the strata. So the strata went for almost 10 years without paying beyond the base rate for water, before someone investigated. At that point, the city only back-dated the water use bill to the start of the year, thankfully for the homeowners.

So yeah, it happens, probably pretty regularly.