Don’t worry about paying fines for travelling without a ticket on Portugal's public transport system, the government has not collected a fine for nearly three years.
The amount of uncollected fines now tops €50 million as not a single fine has been collected in two years and eight months while the government ‘continues to study solution’ to replace the old methods of collecting overdue amount and penalties applied to fare-dodgers.
Nothing is happening: 331,000 records are sitting around waiting to be processed, the accumulation from nearly three years of inactivity.
The Government admits that the long delay is having consequences on transport company accounts and that it is ‘already working on a proposal to amend the enforcement of fines process.’
State-owned transport business have been the worst hit with penalties amounting to €36.8 million waiting to be recovered, much of this due to far dodgers on the national CP railway system where 90,000 cases are waiting to be processed to recoup €15 million.
The delay of two years and eight months in the collection of these fines has been due to a ‘legislative review’ in 2013 undertaken by the Tax Authority which is responsible for collecting monies owned.
This review proposed a solution that was even more useless than the previous system, since which the Tax Authority has not collected a single fine and gives every indication that it simply has given up.
