A new damning report reveals that a widespread fraud system in Texas is enabling people to pass the state’s safety inspection even when their vehicles aren’t capable of doing so, raising concerns that many cars on Texas roads may be unsafe. State lawmakers are proposing different solutions to address the issue.
In Texas, drivers must have a state inspection completed each year to ensure compliance with safety standards. For example, passenger cars need to have tires, seat belts, brakes, and headlamps that are deemed safe for Texas roads where the public is present. A one-year safety inspection is just $7.00 so there’s little reason to fake it if the vehicle in question is indeed safe.
Despite that, fraud investigators in Texas believe that millions of vehicles each year get a passing grade simply by paying off the shop that does the inspection. That would allow cars that Texas law deems unsafe to obtain license plates and then, of course, to drive on the road otherwise unnoticed by law enforcement.
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Local news NBC 5 went to one shop that is licensed by the Texas Department of Public Safety to conduct these state-required inspections. Despite sitting there for over an hour, the team didn’t see a single vehicle drive in or out of the location. State records show that the same shop claimed it had completed 23 inspections during that exact same time frame.
Sgt. Jose Escribano says that the state’s inspection system has opened the door to this kind of fraud. Shops involved in the practice sell what he calls “clean scans” by faking safety and emission data one way or another. He says the volume and speed at which these shops complete their work should be an automatic red flag.
Despite the fact that the state can see the data, it must be manually analyzed so there are no automatic triggers in place to slow this type of fraud. “Why don’t you shut them down when the inspector is entering the information in on the analyzer? Why? I don’t understand,” Escribano said.
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In response to the initial report, Texas Senator Royce West says that ” “They need to figure out exactly what type of software they need to put in place in order to be able to check it out and then respond accordingly… You can’t respond a year later. You’ve got to respond in real-time to that.”
Representative Craig Goldman has a different idea, namely, to scrap vehicle safety inspections altogether. “Good people are going to get their cars inspected and frankly, waste that time and waste that money to get them inspected versus the criminals out there that are going to game the system,” Goldman said.
A number of states across the nation employ safety inspections to one degree or another. Data about how much it improves actual on-the-road safety is unclear. NBC5 rightly points out that with an estimated 5 million cars on the road in Texas with fake safety credentials, it’s all the more difficult to determine whether inspections are doing the state any good.