For years, the Interior Ministry has been complaining that Bulgaria lacks a mechanism for collecting fines imposed on drivers.

No matter who the minister, the words have always been strikingly similar, along the lines of: “the fines are too small, because of the legislation we cannot make drivers pay their fines, and this is the reason for the high number of road accidents”.

A recent report by the National Audit Office said that for 2006 alone, drivers owed 34 million leva in fines. Only two million leva of this sum had been paid by the end of April this year.

On March 21, current Interior Minister Roumen Petkov told a news conference that the Traffic Police (KAT) had no clear system of collecting the money. He said that he had pointed this out several times as one of the reasons for the high rate of road accidents in the country.

According to Interior Ministry statistics, more than 400 people died and 3800 were injured in close to 3200 road accidents since the start of the year. If this trend continues, the prognosis is that a further 600 people will die on Bulgaria’s roads by the end of 2007.

On June 14, Petkov received strong support from Parliament when MPs approved the second reading of amendments to the Road Traffic Act.

The amendments include higher fines for fast and reckless driving, drunk driving, refusing to take a breathalyser test and lack of third party liability motor insurance.

The MPs decided that drivers who repeatedly break the speed limit by 31km/h will be fined 300 leva and their driving licences will be suspended for three months.

When drivers exceed the permitted speed by more than 50km/h, they will be fined 200 to 250 leva and their licence will be suspended for up to three months.

The licences of drivers found to have a blood alcohol content (BAC) of more than 0.5mg per 100 millilitres of blood will be suspended for up to six months.

Driving licences will be suspended for one to 12 months and drivers fined 200 to 500 leva if their BAC exceeds 0.5mg per 100 milliliters of blood and up to 1.2mg per 100 millilitres of blood.

Refusing to take a breathalyer test will mean a licence suspension of either 12 months, 18 months or two years, and fines ranging from 500 leva to 1000 leva.

Parliament also decided that to get a driving licence, applicants must at least have primary school education.

The most radical change, however, was linked to Petkov’s great worry about uncollected fines. All drivers with unpaid fines will face having their driving licences confiscated unless they pay up their fines within a month from the entry into force of the amendments.

This immediately raised several questions.

First, is the Interior Ministry capable of handling the process of collecting the fines?

Second, how will the ministry prevent chaos in the event of drivers owing 34 million leva between them suddenly showing up and trying to pay their fines, all in a period of less than a month?

These concerns were raised by several Bulgarian-language media, citing the current situation when hundreds of vehicles form queues stretching several kilometres in front of KAT headquarters in Sofia, waiting to be registered.

There was a new twist after Parliament adopted the amendments, when Petkov told an international forum on road safety that it was not the Interior Ministry’s job to chase people to collect fines from them.

“It is not our problem,” Petkov said.

He said only that there should be a general solution to the problem but did not spell out precisely what steps such a solution would involve.

Yordan Mirchev, head of Parliament’s committee on transport, which was behind the amendments, did not share Petkov’s view.

On June 18, Mirchev told Parliament that it was indeed the Interior Ministry that had to come up with a mechanism to collect the fines.

“It is all in the ministry’s hands,” Mirchev said. “After all I am not a police officer and it is not my job to write the Interior Ministry’s regulations and organise their work.”

Mirchev added to this with a startling admission: many drivers, he said, would get away with not paying their fines simply because there was no database of information on the unpaid fines.

“We do not have a system which monitors, registers and sanctions people who have not paid their fines,” Mirchev said.

Nor is there any such system at the National Revenue Agency (NRA).

In 2006, it was proposed that the NRA should be in charge of collecting the fines because its primary role is to collect revenue, including taxes, for the state. However, the agency has said repeatedly that collecting fines is not among the NRA’s responsibilities.

The NRA said that “as a sign of goodwill” they had opened a bank account into which people could pay their fines.

“The rest is up to the institution which imposes the fines, not the NRA,” the NRA said, in a clear reference to the Interior Ministry.

While Government bodies continue to duck and dive, people are saying that that even if they wanted to pay their fines, the ways to do so were too complicated.

On several occasions, people have told reporters on various television channels that they did not know how and where to pay the fines.

An inquiry and an experiment by The Sofia Echo established that this was not true.

Most fines in Bulgaria are imposed for speeding or overtaking when it is not safe to do so. In such cases, the driver is issued with a ticket. Within 30 working days from the date on the fine, the driver must go to the KAT regional unit where a document is issued stating the amount of money the motorist has been fined.

In Sofia, this happens at the KAT headquarters in the Darvenitsa neighbourhood. Once the driver has the document, there are two options. The driver can simply pay the fine immediately while in the Traffic Police building, at a special office set up to accept payments for fines. The other option is to transfer the money to the NRA’s bank account, which can be done from any bank. The IBAN number is clearly stated on the document; it is even highlighted.

Every regional unit of Traffic Police has offices to accept payments of fines, so there is no reason for anyone to complain of a lack of ways to pay fines. The only reason could be reluctance to pay, which has nothing to do with Traffic Police not providing sufficient suitable options to pay fines.

The only difference introduced by the amendments is a time limit for paying the fines, and the subsequent sanctions for not doing so.

Before any scenarios are imagined of hordes of defaulters storming Traffic Police units to pay fines, it should be remembered that payment can be done through bank transfers, including through internet banking.

When exactly the new amendments will come into force is a matter of bureaucracy. Previous observations of Parliament’s work shows that if willing, MPs can send a bill to the State Gazette printers within a month after the second reading of a draft bill has been approved, which in this case means late August.

By this time, unscrupulous drivers can hope that their names do not appear on the list of debtors and not pay their fines at all.