The Trans­port Di­vi­sion of the Min­istry of Works is now im­ple­ment­ing new sys­tems to re­duce the wide­spread fraud that ex­ists among ve­hi­cle own­ers says Trans­port Com­mis­sion­er Clive Clarke.

“I have dis­cov­ered there are a num­ber of per­sons walk­ing around with fraud­u­lent doc­u­ments such fraud­u­lent dri­vers per­mits, cer­ti­fied copies, fraud­u­lent ap­provals from the com­mis­sion­er to use horns on their ve­hi­cles. I have dis­cov­ered most of these doc­u­ments were not gen­er­at­ed in the Li­cens­ing Di­vi­sion. In oth­er words, the tint cer­tifi­cate we are giv­ing, some­one could go and make that and show it to a law en­force­ment of­fi­cer,” said Clarke who spoke to the me­dia at the open­ing of the Pey­tonville bridge, Kel­ly Dri­ve, Ari­ma, yes­ter­day.

To get around the fraud­u­lent ac­tiv­i­ty, the Trans­port Di­vi­sion is now mov­ing to­wards a dig­i­tal sys­tem, he said.

“One of the things that we had to do in terms of im­ple­ment­ing the tint leg­is­la­tion was to com­put­erise one. Every sin­gle ap­pli­ca­tion, every sin­gle ap­proved tint is on the com­put­er. Why? Be­cause we want to be able to re­spond when some­one asks how many per­sons have been ap­proved.”

He said in the next three months they will be im­ple­ment­ing the Com­put­erised In­spec­tion Sys­tem so that all the garages in the coun­try will now have ac­cess to the data­base. So when ve­hi­cle own­ers go to that garage to do a test and they go with a fraud­u­lent doc­u­ment, the au­thor­i­ties would see whether the ve­hi­cle has ap­proval.

He ad­vised stake­hold­ers like banks to use the Trans­port Di­vi­sion’s on­line sys­tem to ver­i­fy the in­for­ma­tion that loan ap­pli­cants present to them.

“Just re­cent­ly we pulled over three ve­hi­cles...when those ve­hi­cles came to the au­thor­i­ties and we checked our records they had cer­ti­fied copies, they had in­sur­ance, but they were not in their sys­tems. If these in­sur­ance agen­cies were us­ing what we pro­vid­ed, those sit­u­a­tions would have been stopped.”

Dri­vers now have un­til June 6 to en­sure that their win­dow tint com­plies with new mo­tor ve­hi­cle tint laws.

The new win­dow tint reg­u­la­tions were due to come in­to ef­fect on March 8, but mo­torists have been grant­ed an ad­di­tion­al three months to en­sure their ve­hi­cles are com­pli­ant.

He al­so spoke about the tint mea­sur­ing de­vice which will re­place the pre­vi­ous sys­tem where a po­lice of­fi­cer or traf­fic war­den could have looked at a ve­hi­cle and charged the own­er of the ve­hi­cle.

“The new sys­tem al­lows us to use a tint mea­sur­ing de­vice the Vis­i­ble Light Trans­mit­tance (VLT) which gives us the ca­pac­i­ty to tru­ly iden­ti­fy whether this ve­hi­cle is in com­pli­ance with law.”

The ap­proved tint lev­els or Vis­i­ble Light Trans­mit­tance (VLT) are as fol­lows:

The wind­screen – at least 70 per cent VLT,

Wind­screen’s An­ti-Glare Band  - Width = 6” or 15cm from top – at least 35 per cent VLT,

Front win­dows (Dri­ver and Pas­sen­ger) – at Least 35 per cent VLT

Rear win­dows (Back Pas­sen­gers) – at Least 20 per cent VLT

Rear wind­screen – at least 20 per cent VLT