Excise dept staff vets bogus vehicle registration books

Cases emerge of vehicle categories being changed illegally

LAHORE: A team of Punjab Excise and Taxation department has reportedly forged the department’s computer software system and changed the records of vehicle categories.

The officials have illegally converted the vehicles into commercial transport vehicles. The vehicles include those with broken, stolen and illegally engineered chassis smuggled on bogus registration books.

A large number of these fraud cases emerged in 2017 before the department’s "Centralised Excise Computer Data" was activated.

The excise officers have begun to apprehend such cases under their "digital audit" during which password-protected digital footprint records of the involved officers are being traced. The most fraudulent cases relate to vehicles with LPT registration series.

Excise dept issues SOPs for registration of auctioned vehicles

Observing the gravity of the situation, Lahore motor branch director has issued a notification making it mandatory for the owners of commercial vehicles to obtain a Punjab Vehicle Inspection and Certification System (VICS) following new registration of their vehicles, which includes a check for the vehicle’s ownership change and category change.

As per preliminary estimates by the excise officials, the number of vehicles changing the category through counterfeiting is in thousands.

More than 200 cases have surfaced in Lahore, Attock, Rawalpindi and Rahim Yar Khan during the last few days in which the category of vehicles was changed after tampering with the computer record.

A new bogus registration book has been released for the vehicle which has been smuggled to another city after changing its category from the regular vehicle into a commercial vehicle. In cases pertaining to Lahore and Attock, the category of sedan vehicles (4 or 5 seaters) was changed into a truck, bus and Mazda wagon.

Sources in the excise department told The Express Tribune that the forgery had been carried out on a large scale and that it had to be investigated throughout the province. Excise personnel used their passwords to tamper with the computer system, change the vehicle category, and issue its bogus registration book.

Fake CNICs, certificates and other documents were also uploaded during the computer submissions made to change the category. The bogus registration books were used for stolen and smuggled commercial vehicles while the original engine and chassis number of these vehicles were removed and replaced by existing vehicle records. Consequently, two cars of the same engine and chassis number were running on the roads, one of which is original and the other one is fake.

Sources revealed that the excise motor vehicle computer software in Punjab was not centralised prior to 2017. While changing the category of the ownership of the vehicle registered in another city, the excise department officials did not have full access to the original data related to the vehicle.

Taking advantage of the loopholes, the fraudulent mafia released thousands of bogus registration books. The corrupt mafia of the excise department used to search through the computer records for older model cars that they believed would not undergo any transaction by their owners for many years in the excise department.

45 ‘smuggled’ cars registered by Sindh excise dept, admits PPP lawmaker

Excise and taxation minister Hafiz Mumtaz Ahmed while confirmed the news of forgery relating to change of category said and that all this has been done by an organised group in the past. A large number of cases have been caught in some other cities, including Lahore, Rahim Yar Khan and Rawalpindi, and we are now conducting a detailed investigation in this regard across the province using our software. We will also seek assistance from Punjab Information Technology Board (PITB) if necessary, the provincial minister said, adding that vehicles whose registration is proving to be bogus and counterfeit will be prosecuted while fraudulent excise personnel will be dismissed from the job.

On the other side, the general manager at PITB Faisal Yousuf told The Express Tribune that the excise department computer MIS system was updated first updated in 2006 and then in 2011 and 2017 respectively. In 2017, we centralized the excise motor vehicle data across Punjab. The option to change the category is assigned to specific personnel and each of them has their own assigned password. Hence, the personnel involved in forgery could be exposed by scanning up the digital record of the passwords.

Published in The Express Tribune, December 10^th, 2019.