More than eight years after the Government announced it would be putting brakes on the practice of motorists using illegal means to secure vehicle fitness certification, Island Traffic Authority (ITA) Director General Colonel Daniel Pryce has announced that it will take a further three to five years to wipe out this illegality.

“It is something that is on the top of our list because that, as you can imagine, will factor into road safety,” Pryce said at this week’s Jamaica Observer Monday Exchange as the island joined the international community in marking Global Road Safety Week.

“We are going to introduce technology in all of this, which would require the vehicle to be present at the service hub at the point of inspection…so a person cannot just pass a vehicle. We have begun the infrastructure for that, so we are now heading towards procurement of what we need to do that. Three to five years, we should be seeing that sort of thing happening,” Pryce said.

The director general said that if it was up to him, implementing a system to prevent it from occurring would take place now; however, it requires certain resources that are not readily available.

He shared that it has been challenging to find a way of clamping down on the practice of motorists using illegal means to secure fitness certification for motor vehicles. Despite numerous operations to try and get rid of the bad eggs in the system, he said that in the past 12 months no one has been fired for facilitating the illegality.

“We do [try to catch the players]. We continue to have different types of operations. You have to understand the whole ecosystem of it. There is no one person that does it. It is an ecosystem. The person you may approach to do it or get it done for you is not the person who would collect the money or the person who would do it. It is about understanding that to be able to nab all the persons involved,” he said.

In January 2017 the then head of the ITA Ludlow Powell and then Minister of Transport Mike Henry launched the pilot of a Vehicle Management System (VMS) centred on motor vehicle fitness certification.

The computerised ITA-VMS system, which became operational at the Swallowfield Motor Vehicle Examination Depot, was a software application designed to capture all motor vehicle and driver’s licence information that was then done manually at examination depots islandwide.

It was designed to also ensure that there was no duplication of fitness records, and that each motor vehicle would have to visit the examination depot for fitness testing.

Features of the system were said to include the issuing and printing of motor vehicle fitness; the viewing of motor vehicle information; and providing fitness reports within a specific period, per vehicle type, and per certifying officer.