Following an audit on June 12, 2023, on revenues collected from the Express Penalty Scheme, Uganda Revenue Authority unearthed illicit flows involving some of its staff and traffic police officers who stole over Ugx 3.5 Bn from the road offenders’ collected fines.
According to the Uganda revenue audit, the traffic officers under investigation were able to effect the fraud by deleting the EPS receipts from their system and the money was not remitted to the tax body.
However, the illicit activity was easy to be detected due to the fact that when the money is paid by a road offender, the system is designed that it reflects on both the EPS system and the URA system.
According to the information from police sources, the traffic police officers under investigation were not able to cover their tracks on the URA system.
Following the audit, recently, a number of officers in charge of the EPS were sacked after investigations implicated them in the theft of the EPS ticket cash.
In the changes after this fraud was detected, ASP Faridah Nampiima who was the head of the EPS car tracking unit was referred back to the human resource administration directorate at Naguru and replaced by ASP Steven Sande.
Two other police superintendents including Clare Asansire from the ICT directorate and Slyvia Auma(traffic) were sent back to the Human Resource Administration Directorate for redeployment.
The Shock
According to Police sources, Traffic Police is set to recover the 3.5 bn by launching an operation on all motorists that will be found with a deleted EPS receipt. Motorists that will be found with pending EPS tickets will risk having their vehicles being impounded.
However, the Police is still tight lipped about the URA officials and Traffic officers that have been involved in the fraud.
Whereas road users commit multiple traffic offenses partly due to issues not limited to a poor road users’ culture, poor driving training, personal indiscipline and impatience, bad and unmarked roads, traffic officers have a duty to operate with diligence and weed out all bad manners of the roads that risk lives.
Collecting fine arrears is not recovering the stolen 3.5Bn and to me that is just a retaliation that will make motorists’ lives hard.
It is impossible for the road users to be disciplined by highly undisciplined traffic officers. In this 3.5 Bn scandal, Traffic Police and URA should take full responsibility and recover the money from the involved officers instead of victimizing citizens who constantly pay a lot of taxes to keep on the road.
Testimonies from road users in Uganda indicate that most traffic officers collect almost more money in bribes and in the “water” stunt than the government collects in issued EPS tickets. This makes traffic officers one of the most powerful government officials due to the power they yield on the road. Unfortunately, instead of breeding good driving culture in the Ugandans, they leave room to milk money from motorists.
As the President continues to lament and fight against corruption, I equate most of the traffic stations as extensions of illicit tax collection.
Some Traffic officers are shameless to directly ask for money before even checking the car requirements to be on the road. The bad road users know this well and are always prepared with pocket change loose money to pass to the Traffic officers. This is societal decay on the side of road users which must be checked but by who?
Traffic police needs and an overhaul and perhaps an elite service provider be considered or more technological approaches be considered to sort our road use.
Meanwhile, as an everlasting solution is being looked into in recovering the 3.5 Bn, URA officers that connived with traffic officers to steal EPS fines should be listed together with the officers who deleted the tickets. This should be possible because every officer that has log-in credentials to the system can be identified.
On the part of URA, there is no way such a scam can go on for long without detection, there must be insider officers who were enabling the scam. This is where the anti-corruption bodies should start from instead of shielding this shame at the expense of the road users.
