It’s highway robbery — and the MTA doesn’t even know the culprit.
The authority is down at least $56 million thanks to “unbillable” tolls for which officials cannot find an address to mail the bill, State Comptroller Tom DiNapoli said Thursday.
MTA Bridges and Tunnels was unable to send bills for six million crossings through from September 2019 to June 2021 — leaving millions of dollars uncollected, the comptroller’s office said in a letter to the MTA following up on three-year-old audit into its cashless tolling.
A huge chunk of the lost revenue — $33.9 million — stemmed from the MTA and its vendors not having agreements with other states’ DMVs to access vehicle registration information, particularly for temporary plates.
Another $21.8 million went uncollected because license plates were either too dark, too bright, missing a state name — or just missing altogether. Thousands of transactions worth another $2.9 million went unbilled due to bad image quality.
Ex-Gov. Andrew Cuomo announced plans to remove tollbooths at the MTA’s seven bridges and two tunnels in late 2016. The program got underway a few months later.
The system’s flaws have come into sharp focus in recent months. In September, the MTA Inspector General flagged a transit employee who bragged to co-workers about eluding tolls with an obscured license plate and owed $100,000 in tolls and fines.
NYPD has also been forced to crackdown on forged paper license plates, which sources said have exploded in use since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic.
In 2018, DiNapoli flagged an estimated $2.4 million in unbilled tolls from 2013 to 2017 on the Henry Hudson Bridge, which was the MTA’s only “cashless” crossing prior to Cuomo’s announcement. The analysis released Thursday indicates that the MTA has likely lost hundreds of millions of dollars because it was unable to bill drivers.
To curb its financial losses, DiNapoli recommended the MTA refine its algorithm for selecting the best quality picture. The authority attempted to comply — but the percentage of unbilled transactions actually increased over the 2019 to 2021 review.
“The number of unbilled transactions has increased significantly,” auditor Carmen Maldonado wrote in the letter, which was sent to MTA Chariman Janno Lieber on Thursday.
“Under TBTA’s previous toll booth system, these vehicles would have been stopped at the gate,” Maldonado wrote. “Regardless of the reason for the unbilled transaction, the potential revenue loss needs to be addressed and these trends reversed.”
The MTA collects 96.7 percent of tolls owed to it, authority spokesman Aaron Donovan said. “Unbillable” transactions represented less than 2.5 percent of MTA Bridges and Tunnel’s $1.7 billion in revenue last year. MTA cops catch toll evaders “daily,” he said.
“MTA Bridges and Tunnels has a multi-faceted toll enforcement strategy that has led to the interdiction of 5,000 vehicles, resulting in the recovery of over $6.1 million in revenue, and more than 31,000 summonses being issued for covered or obstructed plates,” Donovan said in a statement. “Seventy-six drivers were arrested in cars with fake license plates, including 29 in 2021 alone.”
Said DiNapoli in a statement, “It is heartening to see MTA has taken some steps to go after the worst offenders, but it should do so more consistently.”
“My office’s [2018] audit warned MTA that it was at risk of losing millions on uncollected tolls and sadly that has come to pass,” he said. “There’s no excuse for leaving more than $50 million uncollected when our regional transit system is facing a financial crisis.”
