The Ministry of National Security is reporting that a total of 240,000 traffic tickets have been cleared, following software modification to the island’s traffic ticket management system.

This was disclosed by senior director, technology transformation in the ministry, Arvel Grant, during an interview with JIS News following a meeting with stakeholders on the Traffic Ticket Management System at the ministry’s Oxford Road offices in St Andrew, on September 12.

Grant said the 240,000 traffic tickets were recorded as failed payments from September 2010 to April 2019.

“We worked with e-Gov, did an automated verification, matching and clean-up exercise, so 240,000 failed payments were identified and all of those have been cleared out,” he said, adding that the errors resulted from misinterpretation in translating handwritten tickets.

“What we recognised was that there was an issue in the system where transactions were being accumulated, persons would go to the tax authority, make a payment and during the update process the ticket wasn’t fully updated because of bad handwriting or issues in translating what was written on the hand tickets,” he said.

“For handwritten tickets, persons weren’t able to make out the driver’s licence, offence code, and if there was an error, the verification of the payment would fail. There were cases where persons would have paid their tickets but the full update of the system to clear the ticket out was not completed,” he added.

Grant said over the years, those failed verifications accumulated and the related traffic tickets remained labelled as outstanding tickets.

He said the software modification has enhanced the integrity and efficiency of the traffic ticketing data.

“Everyone can be more comfortable that the data gives an accurate reflection of the tickets that were issued and their current status,” he told JIS News.