The value of safety
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".
No time, no money
There are two reasons why people prefer not to follow the rules. One is that it takes time, and usually people simply prefer not to waste it on what they see as, in most cases, an "academic" procedure. In many cases, it really is an academic check given that most drivers tend to check their brakes and lights on a regular basis, making it unlikely that even a 15-year-old car would fail.
The other reason for skirting the procedure is money. As stipulated in the ordinance, one of the documents people need to show is the receipt for road tax paid. This tax, depending on the car’s engine, could vary between 100 and 200 leva, in some cases even more. For example, the tax on an 1.6 litre eight-year-old vehicle in Sofia this year is 167 leva.
Significantly, many people drive second-hand cars that are worth no more than a couple of thousand leva and they see paying the road tax as an unreasonably high expense. Such drivers can avoid payment by simply not registering the vehicle in the local tax administration.
Currently, a car vendor must go in person to notify the local tax administration so as not to be charged the tax next year. It is up to the buyer to register the car in his name in his respective administration, which many people fail to do, and local administrations are left with thousands of uncollected road tax every year - but that’s another issue. Meanwhile, all drivers must have the annual maintenance inspection sticker so that they are not pulled over by traffic police.
The scheme
Those who have all their papers in order, but want to avoid spending time, are taking advantage of licensed shops that perform the service by doing nothing more than going through the car’s papers.
This works on the theory that if all papers are in order, and the car is relatively new, then everything must be fine. Of course, in such cases one needs a friend or a colleague who knows such shops as it is not a service publicly advertised. It is the good old Bulgarian way of "I know someone who can do this and that". It’s like asking for a good plumber or a dentist; there is always someone who knows someone who can do the job. In 2009, the fee that reputable shops charge is 40 leva. The service at less reputable shops costs 35 leva.
Usually these are shops outside Sofia, in small towns and even villages, and it could take a few days for the package (the sticker) to be delivered. In Sofia, however, the latest trend is to call such shops, which will deliver the sticker to the car’s owner.
This service is more widespread since shops are more willing to make a compromise, not physically inspecting the car since it has all of its papers in order. Some shops, however, are even willing to issue stickers to drivers who have not paid their road tax or simply fear that their cars would not pass the exhaust fume test.
This is possible because the ordinance’s section on how inspections are to be processed says that the drivers must present the shop with both these documents, but in its weekly report to EAAA, the shop has only to report on the vehicle’s registration number, the third-party liability insurance policy, the driver’s ID number and names. It does not require the shop to include in its report the road tax receipt. So the only authority that checks whether drivers have all their papers in order are the shops themselves, not the EAAA.
In a private conversation, an employee at one of Sofia’s reputable shops said that it depended on shopowners’ responsibility how the inspection was done. "I do no more than 10 inspections a day, 40 leva each, while there are colleagues who do between 20 and 30, at a cost of 35 leva each"."
Buses
When it comes to passenger buses, naturally there is more paperwork regarding safety. Most transport companies have their own shops to do inspections, and computer programmes have been implemented so that results are input the moment the inspection is done. When it comes to small companies with one or two buses whose owners fear that they might not pass the inspection, the scheme is to copy data from another bus.
This problem was acknowledged by EAAA head Volodya Kirov who, in an interview with Bulgarian National Television after the May 28 accident, said that there were problems which could be solved by installing a "face control system". This, he said, would ensure that buses and trucks were indeed being checked. This, however, will need additional human resources at the EAAA, whose employees would have to go through every tape in order to check the reliability of the reports filed by the shops.
Of course, another way to do it would be to make shops record the numbers of road tax receipts when reporting back to the EAAA. This could happen by only including a new clause in the EAAA ordinance. Local tax administrations would certainly have nothing against such an idea.
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".
No time, no money
There are two reasons why people prefer not to follow the rules. One is that it takes time, and usually people simply prefer not to waste it on what they see as, in most cases, an "academic" procedure. In many cases, it really is an academic check given that most drivers tend to check their brakes and lights on a regular basis, making it unlikely that even a 15-year-old car would fail.
The other reason for skirting the procedure is money. As stipulated in the ordinance, one of the documents people need to show is the receipt for road tax paid. This tax, depending on the car’s engine, could vary between 100 and 200 leva, in some cases even more. For example, the tax on an 1.6 litre eight-year-old vehicle in Sofia this year is 167 leva.
Significantly, many people drive second-hand cars that are worth no more than a couple of thousand leva and they see paying the road tax as an unreasonably high expense. Such drivers can avoid payment by simply not registering the vehicle in the local tax administration.
Currently, a car vendor must go in person to notify the local tax administration so as not to be charged the tax next year. It is up to the buyer to register the car in his name in his respective administration, which many people fail to do, and local administrations are left with thousands of uncollected road tax every year - but that’s another issue. Meanwhile, all drivers must have the annual maintenance inspection sticker so that they are not pulled over by traffic police.
The scheme
Those who have all their papers in order, but want to avoid spending time, are taking advantage of licensed shops that perform the service by doing nothing more than going through the car’s papers.
This works on the theory that if all papers are in order, and the car is relatively new, then everything must be fine. Of course, in such cases one needs a friend or a colleague who knows such shops as it is not a service publicly advertised. It is the good old Bulgarian way of "I know someone who can do this and that". It’s like asking for a good plumber or a dentist; there is always someone who knows someone who can do the job. In 2009, the fee that reputable shops charge is 40 leva. The service at less reputable shops costs 35 leva.
Usually these are shops outside Sofia, in small towns and even villages, and it could take a few days for the package (the sticker) to be delivered. In Sofia, however, the latest trend is to call such shops, which will deliver the sticker to the car’s owner.
This service is more widespread since shops are more willing to make a compromise, not physically inspecting the car since it has all of its papers in order. Some shops, however, are even willing to issue stickers to drivers who have not paid their road tax or simply fear that their cars would not pass the exhaust fume test.
This is possible because the ordinance’s section on how inspections are to be processed says that the drivers must present the shop with both these documents, but in its weekly report to EAAA, the shop has only to report on the vehicle’s registration number, the third-party liability insurance policy, the driver’s ID number and names. It does not require the shop to include in its report the road tax receipt. So the only authority that checks whether drivers have all their papers in order are the shops themselves, not the EAAA.
In a private conversation, an employee at one of Sofia’s reputable shops said that it depended on shopowners’ responsibility how the inspection was done. "I do no more than 10 inspections a day, 40 leva each, while there are colleagues who do between 20 and 30, at a cost of 35 leva each"."
Buses
When it comes to passenger buses, naturally there is more paperwork regarding safety. Most transport companies have their own shops to do inspections, and computer programmes have been implemented so that results are input the moment the inspection is done. When it comes to small companies with one or two buses whose owners fear that they might not pass the inspection, the scheme is to copy data from another bus.
This problem was acknowledged by EAAA head Volodya Kirov who, in an interview with Bulgarian National Television after the May 28 accident, said that there were problems which could be solved by installing a "face control system". This, he said, would ensure that buses and trucks were indeed being checked. This, however, will need additional human resources at the EAAA, whose employees would have to go through every tape in order to check the reliability of the reports filed by the shops.
Of course, another way to do it would be to make shops record the numbers of road tax receipts when reporting back to the EAAA. This could happen by only including a new clause in the EAAA ordinance. Local tax administrations would certainly have nothing against such an idea.