Tollway boss: Nearly half of all violations honest mistakes

Nearly half of all drivers recently slapped with toll fines are not intentionally cheating, and tollway officials are now reprimanding a contractor blamed for a 13-month backlog of toll violation cases.

Tollway Director Brian McPartlin told the Daily Herald editorial board Tuesday that the agency is withholding payments to the contractor for failing to send out violation notices for more than a year -- a mixup tied to a rash of I-PASS account problems.

The disclosure marks the first time tollway officials have estimated the number of fines related to I-PASS account errors or moved to punish the company that failed to mail violations from July 2006 to August 2007 because of problems switching from one contractor to another.

Some suburban lawmakers and watchdog groups have been clamoring for months for similar action.

Still, McPartlin maintained that the toll enforcement system is fair. He said those facing fines because of their own I-PASS account problems -- expired credit cards or unregistered license plates -- can have the slate wiped clean by calling the tollway.

The rest should have known to pay their tolls and deserve the fines, he said.

While an I-PASS owner's responsibility, the magnitude of account problems has been blamed by tollway officials in part on the 13-month delay.

Normally, drivers receive fines shortly after a third violation, but the delay meant drivers didn't get notices for more than a year. Accounting problems that could have been solved early ended up languishing for months and resulting in thousands of dollars in fines.

The fallout is dramatic.

The tollway's violation rate tripled from three out of every 100 toll transactions to nearly one in 10 during the delay.

McPartlin said he expects that to drop back down to around 5 percent in the coming months as I-PASS accounts are fixed.

As the tollway eats through the fine backlog, more than 10,000 violation notices are mailed a day -- twice the normal rate. Those receiving violations have flooded the tollway's call center, prompting officials to spend another $65,000 beefing up telephone lines to handle the volume.

McPartlin is still unsure what the true violation rate is because he doesn't know how many recorded violations are intentional scofflaws. But he estimated that as many as half may prove to be I-PASS customers with account problems that can be cleared up.

The Daily Herald outlined ongoing problems and other violation enforcement issues in an investigative series in January.

Ultimately, McPartlin said Tuesday, it is up to drivers to ensure their accounts are accurate.

I-PASS users are legally responsible for registering cars to the account, putting money in the account and updating credit card and personal data. McPartlin said the tollway mails and e-mails notices when credit cards expire and has a marketing campaign to remind drivers to update accounts.

On Tuesday, McPartlin characterized the 13-month delay as an "inconvenience" and a "backend office issue."

"It did not go as smoothly as we would like it to have gone," he said, and he apologized for the problem.

The delay is partially the result of the former contractor, Pennsylvania-based TransCore, failing to work well with the new enforcement contractor, Texas-based Electronic Transaction Consultants, McPartlin said. He said the tollway was also partially to blame because of requirements it added to the contract.

"I'm going to say we had some responsibility here," he said, while describing the task of transferring massive amounts of data between systems. "Our folks had a learning curve."

McParlin refused to detail what contract payments were being withheld from ETC and what the ultimate financial outcome would be for the company. But he said it was a "sizable amount of money."

ETC is in its second year of a five-year, $79 million contract to manage the I-PASS and violation system. TransCore now runs the call center.

Officials from both companies did not return phone calls seeking comment Tuesday. Previously, ETC officials said the delay was both unanticipated and unavoidable.