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Serious fraud in parking lots

M

Mark R

Diamond Member
Why is it govt funds always get frittered away on the most inane stuff.

My town recently announced that they had just spent $250k combatting serious fraud, and theft of public services. Fair enough, I thought - until I realised what was actually going on.

The fraud that had been targetted was 'fraudulent use of parking spaces'; drivers leaving a parking lot were passing their used tickets, with time remaining, onto drivers entering the parking lot so they didn't have to purchase a new ticket. To combat this, all the parking lot ticket machines had been upgraded at a cost of $250k.

Now, after you have paid for your ticket, you must type in your plate number, so it's obvious that the ticket was purchased for that particular car. Of course, they've even managed to screw this up - the machines have A-B-C keyboards instead of Q-W-E-R-T-Y, so it's hunt-and-peck while a line of people builds up behind you.
 
Find out who sold them the machines and follow the money trail.

I'd place a bet that the person making $$$ from it has no interest in the fraud anyway.
 
Government policy dictates if some one is cheating them system out of $700 then we should spend several million to prevent the cheating and then just raise the tax that was being cheated to pay for the expensive cheating methods.

Remember when they wanted to install GPS systems in hybrid cars in California I think? The cars weren't "paying their fair share" of the gasoline tax. Weeeeeee! All you can do is drink to forget.
 
Heh I do remember that idea to equip cars with GPS devices and have people pay by the mile. What I never understood was what purpose did the GPS serve? In essence by having people pay a gasoline tax they are already paying by the mile.

It died quietly and I would love to see who would be selling these mandated GPS devices and what ties they have to the idiot politicians who would push that through.
 
If you want to see local government spring into action, hit them where it hurts the most: their pocketbook.
 
thats not idiocy--its corruption. I would be surprised if someone involved in the purchase didn't have ties to the vendor.
 
How much revenue will the city raise by this measure and ending the 'ticket sharing' practice over, say, the next 10 years?
 
Originally posted by: Mark R

My town recently announced that they had just spent $250k combatting serious fraud, and theft of public services. Fair enough, I thought - until I realised what was actually going on.
Click to expand...

Not all city governments are this stupid or stupid in the same ways. This is a specific incident.

What town is this? It may be fun to harness the AnandTech effect by asking everyone to e-mail your city council and see what happens if they get a large volume of mail about it.
 
Originally posted by: Genx87
Heh I do remember that idea to equip cars with GPS devices and have people pay by the mile. What I never understood was what purpose did the GPS serve? In essence by having people pay a gasoline tax they are already paying by the mile.

It died quietly and I would love to see who would be selling these mandated GPS devices and what ties they have to the idiot politicians who would push that through.
Click to expand...

Gasoline tax is somewhat regressive (in that a large portion of poor people pay a lot of it...but poor people have all the best RVs, ATVs, boats and biggest trucks so what do you expect? 😛), but its already quite fair in regards to those who use more pay more, without being very complicated. The concern was that hybrid car owners were "cheating" the system out of gas tax revenues, since the cars weren't super light (I think they were using this weight justification) but used less gas so they weren't paying their fair share of tax for driving on the road. The amount of revenue they were "losing" was pathetic, and the "solution" was horribly complicated (and expensive!) to setup and administer, on top of being humiliating to the group it targeted.

This is fresh on my mind because NPR had a peice this morning about declining gas tax revenues and how it related to my and other states. It seems that after robbing the transportation fund to pay for pie in the sky bullshit programs over the years, our bridges have started to fall into rivers and roads fall apart. As gas has gotten higher in price, people have moved to small cars that use less fuel and cost less to register. So they have less money and a pile of basic maintenance work that should have been done years ago piling up.

The piece suggested that some states were considering charging based on mileage traveled. I reject this as absolutely retarded. The fact is the solution is to either cut bullshit programs (will never happen) or GROW A PAIR OF BALLS and raise the gas tax. Raising the tax is what they are doing anyway, but they again want a complicated additional system so they can try to hide the fact that they're raping you even harder then before.

These ideas are so mind numbingly stupid that again, they remove my faith that god exists. Surely, if god exists upon the moment he heard of these ideas he would have thrown the entire earth into the sun, proclaiming that human kind was a failed experiment! 😛
 
Originally posted by: Harvey

What town is this? It may be fun to harness the AnandTech effect by asking everyone to e-mail your city council and see what happens if they get a large volume of mail about it.
Click to expand...

Great , they'd get all kinds of e-mails telling them the terrorists are coming and calling them communists for having any taxes.
 
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