When 16 people died in a hellish bus crash on May 28 near the town of Yambol, a lot of questions were asked about just what was going on with annual obligatory inspections of motor vehicles in Bulgaria.

Eyewitnesses said that the 20-year-old bus had sliced down the hill unable to stop, which suggested that it had some sort of technical malfunction. When investigators announced that the bus had passed its maintenance inspection just a few weeks previously, quite naturally all eyes turned to the more than 700 shops licensed by the Transport Ministry to carry out such inspections.

While most of the media have concentrated on heavy motor vehicles (buses and trucks), The Sofia Echo decided to test the system checking light motor vehicles.

The law
There are a few things essential to drive legally in Bulgaria. First, a valid driving licence and a document stating ownership of the car. Second, for driving outside cities, towns and villages, a sticker on the car showing that the obligatory annual third-party liability insurance has been paid. The third is a sticker showing that the car has passed its annual maintenance inspection confirming its road safety.

The two stickers are pasted in the bottom left corner of the windscreen so that Traffic police can see them easily. Routinely, traffic police pulling over drivers will want to see these stickers, so it is essential to have them to avoid fines of several hundred leva.

While third-party liability insurance stickers are issued by private insurers which have an interest in all their clients having them, control over the annual maintenance inspection sticker seems a little less effective, which allows drivers to easily take a detour around the procedure stipulated by the Transport Ministry.

The procedure
The procedure under which annual maintenance inspections are conducted is stipulated by ordinance 35 of the Transport Ministry and is under the jurisdiction of the ministry’s Executive Agency Automobile Administration (EAAA). The agency issues licences to mechanical shops that want to perform these inspections, and stipulates the rules they must follow.

For light motor vehicles, drivers must present to these shops a number of documents including the car’s registration papers, the third-party liability insurance, the old sticker proving that the car has been inspected the previous year and the receipt showing that the owner has paid the annual road tax to the municipality in which the owner is resident.

Inspections include a check of the vehicle’s brakes, lights and the level of exhaust fumes; this takes between 15 and 30 minutes. If everything checks out, the car owner receives the new annual maintenance inspection sticker. Licensed shops buy their stickers from EAAA and also have to report on a weekly basis to the EAAA’s regional offices on the number of maintenance inspections they have done, and provide the protocols as proof.

Reportedly, EAAA checks whether the stickers bought by the shops match the number of inspections done, and checks whether everything was done according to the law.

The only problem in this scenario is that it works only when both parties, the shops and car owners, wish to follow it. For those who do not, there is more than enough room to evade the process – and without cars ever having been anywhere near the places where they were "checked".