In the pockets

By Egay Uy

WHY am I hearing complaints from motor vehicle owners about how difficult it is now to renew the registration of their motor vehicles at the Land Transportation Office?

At first, I thought it was the kind of service that the LTO delivers that has become lousy until I knew how difficult it is to have a motor vehicle tested for smoke emission by supposedly accredited smoke-belching centers.

Why should a vehicle owner queue up in a smoke emission testing center at a few hours past midnight just to get his vehicle’s smoke emission tested which takes only a few minutes? Is this some kind of practical joke?

Earlier reports say that the LTO has suspended the operation of many of the accredited smoke-belching centers because of improper and unreliable results, e.g., smoke belchers still got a clean bill of health, so to speak, even as the vehicles failed in the test. So, the easiest way out for the LTO to supposedly curb the practice is to pass on to the motoring public the burden of carrying on our shoulders the inefficiency of the LTO’s own supervisory powers over testing centers.

Motor vehicle owners pay a road user’s tax. If this tax is not included in the taxation principle that its payment should be easy for the taxpayer, then this has to be another taxation animal that we don’t know much about.

From the complaints from motorists, I can deduce a conclusion that instead of the LTO doing its job, it merely sits on its rocking chair in a cold air-conditioned office doing nothing while the lowly taxpayer sweats it out queuing in smoke testing centers from two o’clock in the morning!

Does this result in an equation that a poor and lousy supervisory authority equals another burden to taxpayers? It probably does because, from the looks of it, every motor vehicle owner (except the well-offs who can pay errand boys) is burdened by this poor and lousy supervisory authority.

Government services of national agencies have notably become short of expectations and this LTO burden has added to the list.

Remember the Department of Health that is indifferent to the burden of private hospital patients who are figuratively killed by the exorbitant prices of medicines in hospital pharmacies? Then there is that failure to immediately address a national emergency that is the novel coronavirus. Why? Are they in some people’s pockets?

(Egay Uy is a lawyer. He chairs the City’s Regulatory and Complaint Board, co-chairs with the city mayor the City Price Coordinating Council, and chairs the city’s Joint Inspection Team.  He retired as a vice president of Cepalco.)