ETC to turn to courts to collect outstanding toll fees

24th February 2016

By: Irma Venter

Creamer Media Senior Deputy Editor

  

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The first summons to collect outstanding Gauteng e-toll debt would be issued in the next two weeks, said Electronic Toll Collection (ETC) COO Mark Ridgway in Johannesburg on Wednesday.

ETC collected toll fees on the Gauteng toll network on behalf of the South African National Roads Agency Limited (Sanral).

“There is an obligation to collect the debt and that is what we are going to do,” added ETC CEO Jamie Surkont.

“People have a choice to pay or not to pay, as long as they realise that there are consequences to not paying. The nonpayment of toll fees is illegal.”

ETC had mandated ITC Business Administrators to collect all outstanding debt on the system. Sanral was to foot the bill for any civil action in court.

ETC had also moved to “list” vehicles that have toll debt attached to them.

Surkont noted that the vehicle dealer network had requested this, as the administrative burden within dealerships to settle the outstanding toll fees had proved exceptionally cumbersome.

Listing a vehicle meant, in theory, that a dealer might expect all toll bills to be settled before accepting a vehicle as a trade-in, for example, or even penalise the owner on a trade-in, in order to settle the bill.

Ridgway noted that Sanral had also indicated its intent to make any nonpayment of toll fees an AARTO infringement, which meant it might, in future, when legally able to do so, issue traffic fines to those not settling their toll bills.

With a payment rate among regular toll-road users of greater than 50%, and with roughly 2.5-million users a month, would ETC rush out and issue millions of summons?

No, said Ridgway. ETC would focus on those who wittingly “refuse to pay”, with so-called nonresponders second on the list.

The focus would initially be on historic debt.

ETC had launched a project to collect outstanding historical debt on the toll network, dating from December 3, 2013, to the end of August 2015.

Road users were offered a 60% discount to settle their debt for this period before May 1. They would be able to pay their debt over a six-month period.

“If you owe R1 000, you would need to pay R400 to get the R600 discount,” noted Ridgway.

“If you don’t pay the R400, it would become R1 000 on May 1.”

“This debt has been ringfenced and we are in the process of collecting it,” he added.

He said ETC would not wait for May 1 to pursue those who had clearly indicated that they were not going to settle their accounts.

Just less than 520 000 accounts owed 83% of the historic debt, which was R5.2-billion.

One transport company owed R26-million, which was ETC’s biggest outstanding debt.

However, the average monthly historic toll debt was less than R90 a month, said Ridgway.

Already there had been some success with the historic debt drive, with five of the ETC’s top ten debtors indicating that they would settle their bills, which varied between R5-million and R25-million.

It was a challenge to collect a “bubble of debt” that was two-and-a-half years old, admitted Surkont, with the long wait to pursue debtors making “it more onerous than necessary”.

Ridgway hoped not to implement another discount programme in future.

Surkont believed a second programme would create a belief with road users that “they could manage their noncompliance”.

He said continued nonpayment could impact on Sanral’s and government’s standing with ratings agencies, as well as on Sanral’s sustainability.  Also, the debt would have to be recovered some way or the other, with the tax payer remaining the responsible party.

Surkont said indications were that government had decided that the user-pay principle was here to stay and that it would not turn back from the debt collection process, despite this being an election year.

 

Edited by Creamer Media Reporter

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