Truckies’ tax trick blamed on the Govt

Press, 12 March 1985, Page 16

Truckies’ tax trick blamed on the Govt

PA Hamilton The Government is to blame for truckies illegally rigging mileage indicators to avoid road-user charges, says the Waikato Road Transport Association. A transport magazine, “New Zealand Trucking,” caused a stir when it published methods of tampering with hubodometers to avoid road tax.

The meters are attached to truck and trailer wheels and are supposed to be tamper-proof. The magazine claimed that up to 80 per cent of truckies were using methods to make the meters show fewer kilometres than were actually travelled. The Waikato Road Transport Association’s secretary, Mr Mel Ouston, said the practice had been widespread since the Government adopted the method of assessing tax eight years ago. He said his association had been telling the Government to change the method for calculating the charges to stop the cheats. However, he was not going to pass

judgment on operators who had avoided the tax. “I don’t hold anything, against them, because we have told the Government again and again that the scheme is an absolute disaster,” he said. Mr Ouston said Sweden was the only other country to use such a method of assessing road-user charges.

Truckies wanted a new system based on a charge on fuel or some other foolproof scheme. “In country areas some people remove the hubodometer and just put it on when they come into town,” he said.

Many truckies were adopting such practices because they had cash-flow problems, Mr Ouston said. The trucking magazine defended its demonstration of illegal meter tampering by saying such techniques were common knowledge. ‘We are just offering a demonstration of how easy it is to abuse a system the Government has decided to retain for collection of more than $175 million a year,” the magazine said.