SHAL­IZA HAS­SANALI

The Li­cens­ing Di­vi­sion is mov­ing to im­ple­ment new dri­vers’ per­mits (DPs) by month’s end.

The ini­tia­tive is aimed at stop­ping false dri­vers’ li­cens­es from be­ing pro­duced by fraud­sters and which are now wide­ly used by Venezue­lans and T&T na­tion­als. It is un­known how many of these fake DPs are in the hands of non-na­tion­als.

How­ev­er, Trans­port Com­mis­sion­er Clive Clarke, in a face-to-face in­ter­view on Thurs­day with Guardian Me­dia at the Min­istry of Works and Trans­port head­quar­ters in Port-of-Spain, con­firmed that some of the hold­ers of fraud­u­lent per­mits are Venezue­lans while some bo­gus li­cens­es have been en­gag­ing the at­ten­tion of the T&T Po­lice Ser­vice.

Speak­ing in the pres­ence of Works and Trans­port Min­is­ter Ro­han Sinanan, Clarke said one way of stop­ping the forged per­mits be­ing used was by is­su­ing new per­mits with se­cu­ri­ty fea­tures and hid­den mark­ings by the end of this year and re­call­ing the over 700,000 valid per­mits in the com­ing months.

Clarke made it clear that the fake per­mits were be­ing repli­cat­ed by in­di­vid­u­als out­side the am­bit of their of­fices.

Since his ap­point­ment in March 2020, Clarke said Li­cens­ing Di­vi­sion has picked up a num­ber of false per­mits con­tain­ing names, ad­dress­es and dates of births of le­git­i­mate dri­vers, while the pho­to­graph bears the im­age of some­one else.

False per­mits tend to car­ry the same num­bers as le­git­i­mate per­mits.

“We have seen an up­surge in du­pli­cate num­bers where per­sons are hav­ing false dri­ver’s per­mits be­ing cre­at­ed on the out­side. In or­der for that to look as close as pos­si­ble to our records, they are ba­si­cal­ly us­ing what we call our num­ber range. But that is in no way on our records,” Clarke said.

Pressed on how many fake per­mits they have been picked up un­der his tenure, Clarke said rough­ly 700.

The Li­cens­ing Di­vi­sion has over 700,000 reg­is­tered dri­vers on its data­base.

In Jan­u­ary, Clarke said they will in­tro­duce an on­line pro­vi­sion­al sys­tem us­ing codes for every ser­vice trans­ac­tion. This sys­tem will pave the way for the re­new­al of per­mits and ve­hi­cle trans­fers on­line.

“By the end of De­cem­ber, a new dri­ver’s per­mit will be out. That per­mit it­self pro­vides us with the da­ta set and the en­vi­ron­ment to com­mence that on­line re­new­al. Be­cause we are chang­ing the de­sign of the per­mit, you will have the op­por­tu­ni­ty to up­load your pic­ture on­to the per­mit.”

Fol­low­ing this process, the ap­pli­cant, Clarke said, would have to vis­it a li­cens­ing of­fice to ver­i­fy their doc­u­ments.

Col­lec­tion of the re­new­al will have to be made at a TTCon­nect site or a Li­cens­ing Of­fice with the old DP be­ing sur­ren­dered.

“What would hap­pen there...a num­ber of per­sons would not be able to sub­mit that (their ex­pired per­mits and doc­u­ments) be­cause they are walk­ing around bo­gus per­mits right now,” Clarke said.

With­out di­vulging too much, Clarke boast­ed that the new per­mits will be em­bed­ded with en­hanced se­cu­ri­ty fea­tures and mark­ings aimed at pre­vent­ing du­pli­ca­tion. The spe­cial mark­ings will be de­tect­ed by law en­force­ment of­fi­cers us­ing hand­held de­vices.

If a per­mit does not have these mark­ings it will be deemed fraud­u­lent.

He said the new per­mits will al­so have “what we call ghost pic­tures.” A ghost im­age is a small­er ver­sion of an orig­i­nal pho­to on a card and is usu­al­ly print­ed in a se­mi-trans­par­ent form.

Clarke said the de­sign for the new per­mits has al­ready been com­plet­ed.

“They are be­ing print­ed and test­ed,” Clarke re­vealed.

He said on­ly dri­vers with re­new­al ap­point­ments will be is­sued new per­mits be­gin­ning at the end of De­cem­ber.

A re­call of un­ex­pired per­mits will fol­low.

“I will be rec­om­mend­ing to the Min­is­ter and our Per­ma­nent Sec­re­tary for con­sid­er­a­tion, that we im­ple­ment a re­call mech­a­nism sub­ject to their ap­proval. What the in­tro­duc­tion of new dri­ver’s per­mits will al­low us the op­por­tu­ni­ty, where­by we could re­call those looka­likes of the old ones and gen­er­ate some­thing that is more dif­fi­cult to re­pro­duce.”

Clarke said the re­call of valid per­mits will com­mence next June us­ing ei­ther an al­pha­bet­i­cal sys­tem or ge­o­graph­i­cal lo­ca­tions.

“We will ad­vise the min­is­ter what are the best op­tions be­cause we would have to look at few­er crowds and make it more man­age­able.”

He said the sys­tem in place at Li­cens­ing Di­vi­sion does not con­tribute to the du­pli­ca­tion of per­mits.

“Any du­pli­ca­tion of per­mits has to be per­mits that are gen­er­at­ed on the out­side through fraud­u­lent means...clones,” he said.

Clarke said there are two types of per­mits in ex­is­tence.

“We have one with the bird (holo­graph­ic) and the old ones.”

The old ones could have been re­newed for ten years.

“You have per­sons with some of those still...and ide­al­ly speak­ing, they should have dis­con­tin­ued that be­cause those are the ones in par­tic­u­lar...what you are see­ing...with all due re­spect, the Venezue­lans all over the place with it be­cause it is easy to make those...those are the ones you are see­ing them with. In fact, it is ram­pant!”

Clarke could not say where or how the fraud­u­lent per­mits are be­ing made.

“That is a mat­ter the po­lice are look­ing at to see where they are gen­er­at­ing those. It is not just the Venezue­lans. We are see­ing lo­cal cit­i­zens with fraud­u­lent DPs. We are see­ing per­sons from dif­fer­ent parts of the re­gion with them.”

Clarke said re­cent­ly, Li­cens­ing Di­vi­sion was con­tact­ed by the Fraud Squad con­cern­ing a fake per­mit that was used in a bank in South Trinidad to con­duct a trans­ac­tion.

“And that DP the per­son had was our ex­act ma­te­r­i­al. When you look at it at face val­ue, it ap­peared as ours but it was not one of our prod­ucts. Two things...the top lay­er of the DP was shifty and when we looked up that DP in our sys­tem, it was in some­body else’s name and ad­dress.”

Clarke al­so dis­closed that there are about 800 ve­hi­cles that have du­pli­cat­ed reg­is­tra­tion num­bers as well.

“We would have rec­ti­fied a high num­ber of them. My last check was about 350 there­about.”

The du­pli­ca­tion, Clarke said, oc­curs in two ways. The first in­volved an old sys­tem where num­bers were giv­en out to dif­fer­ent li­cens­ing of­fices.

“And over the years, they some­times mixed up those num­bers....they mixed the batch. You may find in a sit­u­a­tion 15 num­bers may have been giv­en out through that sys­tem. There­fore, when we check our records we are see­ing both ve­hi­cles in our reg­is­tra­tion books. It is easy to treat with those. Those are called ad­min­is­tra­tive er­rors.”

Sec­ond­ly, he said, peo­ple have been cloning the num­bers, which they have been de­tect­ing on their elec­tron­ic sys­tem.

Clarke said the on­ly time the Li­cens­ing Di­vi­sion will get to­tal sani­ti­sa­tion of ve­hi­cle reg­is­tra­tion is by im­ple­ment­ing the new li­cense plates cur­rent­ly be­ing pro­cured.

“It will give us the op­por­tu­ni­ty to re­call all ve­hi­cles and re­vis­it what we call a reval­u­a­tion process.”

Say­ing he was con­cerned about the per­cep­tion of fraud at Li­cens­ing Of­fices, Clarke said once there are poor sys­tems in place and “peo­ple are will­ing to par­tic­i­pate in prac­tices con­trary to pro­ce­dures ...that equates to cor­rup­tion.”