The now rather long-standing Administrative Adjudication of Road Traffic Offences (Aarto) system is still very much in limbo. And, according to Gavin Kelly, technical and operations manager of the Road Freight Association (RFA), it is not going to be implemented any time soon. “The infrastructure – both local at municipal level, and nationally – just doesn’t exist,” he told FTW. “And Aarto is taking a bit of a bashing.” The RFA’s interaction with the government’s Road Traffic Infringements Agency (RTIA) – established a year ago to help enforce the new traffic violations regime and which published an Aarto document for public discussion – is still grinding on rather tediously. “We’ve gone backward and forward commenting on that document,” said Kelly. “In July we tabled a number of points with them, and we’ll probably be at the table again this month.” But any conclusion to these discussions, he added, is likely to be some considerable way off. Meantime, the RTIA has also been facing a barrage of flak, including serious criticism from the auditorgeneral. Commentators said it was set up in such haste that it is now a shambles and received a disclaimer from the auditorgeneral – the worst possible audit outcome. The agency admitted to Parliament’s spending watchdog, the standing committee on public accounts (Scopa), that it lacked adequate capacity to manage its finances properly when it became operational. MPs slammed its poor financial controls, which were so bad that it could not provide the auditorgeneral with sufficient audit documentation for him to form an opinion on the accuracy of its financial statements. In response, Japh Chuwe, the acting registrar of the agency, said it was not entirely to blame. He said some of the information used in setting up the agency had been obtained from the Road Traffic Management Corporation (RTMC) when the agency took over functions from the RTMC. It had inherited all the figures and information, Chuwe said, and the corporation was partly to blame for the poor recordkeeping that had resulted in the disclaimer. Deputy transport minister, Jeremy Cronin, acknowledged that poor systems had been in place at the time the agency was established, and during its operations over the past year. “The criticism is noted and it is probably accurate,” Cronin said. However, he added, the agency would “take responsibility” for the lack of systems and the questionable figures. And if any of you – after Aarto was rolled out in a pilot phase in Tshwane, the City of Johannesburg and Ekurhuleni in 2008, 10 years after the law was enacted – expected that it was likely to come into being soon you are likely to be disappointed, or delighted, depending on your attitude to the proposed Aarto system. Part of the bashing that Kelly referred to has come from the SA Local Government Association (Salga), which represented the municipalities that were supposed to implement the new scheme. It resolved at its national conference to ask the Department of Transport to scrap Aarto “due to the fact that it is not functioning and its negative impact on municipal revenue”. It pointed out that, in the Aarto pilot scheme, the City of Joburg lost R150 million and Tshwane R40m in income from fines, while potential losses for Ekurhuleni were estimated at R50m. At the same time, a Salga document discussed in Parliament stated: “The implementation of Aarto was a decision taken by a national agency and imposed on municipalities without any impact assessment undertaken.” INSERT ‘Financial control at Road Traffic Infringements Agency so bad that it could not provide the auditorgeneral with sufficient audit documentation for him to form an opinion.’
