By YS Chan

It was reported that there are 5.4 million unpaid summonses issued by Kuala Lumpur City Hall (DBKL) since 2007, and Mayor Mhd Amin Nordin Abd Aziz has announced discounts to encourage offenders to pay up.

Summonses issued from 2007 to 2011 may be settled for as low as RM10 each, those from 2012 to 2014 at RM20, and from 2015 onwards for RM30.

If the Mayor does not wish to charge a flat rate for all summonses, then he should have charged RM30 for the oldest summonses and RM10 for the latest.

Lowering the rates for older summonses would only encourage motorists to wait for more discounts rather than rush to settle them.

The public has until Feb 28 next year to settle their outstanding summonses. After that, DBKL will take stern action, including vehicle clamping, blacklisting or instituting legal proceedings on those who still fail to settle their summonses.

DBKL has begun clamping cars that have more than five outstanding summonses, and has blacklisted 4,459 offenders since 2013.

Vehicles blacklisted will be clamped even if they are parked legally in a parking bay, and denied new road tax at the Road Transport Department (JPJ).

There was no mention of how motorists could check whether there are outstanding summonses for their cars, as current owners will not know if any were issued previously.

Notices of traffic offence are stuck on the windscreen and may not reach the vehicle owners. For example, they are thrown away by car jockeys and not passed to customers.

Also, offences for illegal parking are more serious than non-payment of parking in public lots. In any case, these are all notifications of traffic offences, not summonses issued to named drivers or owners.

With so much confusion and inefficiency, it is no surprise that there are 5.4 million unpaid notices of offences in Kuala Lumpur alone.

If the notices issued by all local authorities are added up together with the police and RTD, the number would total many tens of millions.

If the figure is 50 million and RM30 is collected from each, they will yield a sum of RM1.5 billion.

This figure excludes the 2.5 million unpaid AES notices which can now be settled for RM150 each and will bring in another RM375 million.

YS Chan is an FMT reader.

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