SHAL­IZA HAS­SANALI

The Min­istry of Works and Trans­port has spent $1.4 mil­lion on a new dri­ver’s per­mit which is ex­pect­ed to be launched this month.

Last Wednes­day, Trans­port Com­mis­sion­er Clive Clarke sent a pack­age to Per­ma­nent Sec­re­tary So­nia Fran­cis-Year­wood for ap­proval. He said once he gets the green light from Works and Trans­port Min­is­ter Ro­han Sinanan and Fran­cis-Year­wood the new per­mits will be is­sued.

“We are look­ing at the end of March for the lat­est,” he said

There are new fea­tures on the per­mits to help im­prove ser­vice de­liv­ery, pro­ce­dures and de­tect forgery.

Li­cens­ing Di­vi­sion will no longer use colour cod­ed back­grounds for the dif­fer­ent class­es of per­mits which will be em­bed­ded with en­hanced se­cu­ri­ty fea­tures and mark­ings to pre­vent du­pli­ca­tions. These fea­tures will be de­tect­ed by law en­force­ment of­fi­cers us­ing hand­held de­vices.

The per­mits will al­so come with a ghost im­age—a small­er ver­sion of an orig­i­nal pho­to­graph on a card and is usu­al­ly print­ed in a se­mi-trans­par­ent form. If the per­mit does not have these mark­ings it will be deemed a fake.

The min­istry’s IT de­part­ment came up with the DP’s de­sign and Trinidad Sys­tems Ltd (TSL) was award­ed a $1,440,162 con­tract for the hard­ware, soft­ware and se­cu­ri­ty fea­tures.

Clarke said a card cur­rent­ly costs the min­istry $5.30 but the price tag for a new card will be “$5.16 or un­der.”

“The first set of dri­vers who will ben­e­fit from these new DPs are those con­duct­ing re­newals or a per­son who wants to ap­ply for a high­er class ve­hi­cle. We have al­ready com­plet­ed the de­sign and prepar­ing for a launch,” Clarke said.

These dri­vers, Clarke dis­closed, would not be re­quired to go in­to li­cens­ing of­fices to ap­ply.

The process will be done on­line with in­ter­views con­duct­ed via zoom by li­cens­ing staff to ver­i­fy all in­for­ma­tion.

The sec­ond phase will in­volve hold­ers of un­ex­pired per­mits. Col­lec­tion of the re­new­al will have to be made at a TT Con­nect site or a Li­cens­ing Of­fice with the ex­pired per­mit be­ing sur­ren­dered.

Li­cens­ing Di­vi­sion has ap­prox­i­mate­ly 700,000 reg­is­tered DPs in its data­base.

This is the first change in de­sign for DPs since 2017 when a holo­gram of the hum­ming­bird and an iden­ti­fi­er bar­code were in­tro­duced to re­duce du­pli­ca­tion. Clarke said this has not stopped fake per­mits from be­ing gen­er­at­ed ex­ter­nal­ly.

Last Sat­ur­day, li­cens­ing of­fi­cers in­ter­cept­ed a mo­torist near Grand Bazaar with a bo­gus DP.

“When we checked his per­mit on our sys­tem it came up with some­one else’s name and in so do­ing that in­di­vid­ual con­fessed to us that he paid $1,800 for that per­mit to be pro­duced.”

The fake DP had a 2014 is­sue date.

“By look­ing at it we picked up cer­tain fea­tures that were not in keep­ing with our stan­dards.”

Clarke said the dri­ver did not re­veal who he ob­tained the fraud­u­lent DP from but “al­lud­ed that it was is­sued by a dri­ving school.”

Four months ago, Venezue­lan Maria Lau­ra Acos­ta Mon­tano ap­peared vir­tu­al­ly be­fore a San Fer­nan­do mag­is­trate for al­leged­ly us­ing a fake dri­ver’s per­mit to open a bank ac­count.