Many violations

Friday’s post about motor vehicle registration has a back story. I spent a good part of the Wednesday morning looking into this case. When a State senator’s office contacts you about a constituent who has complained concerning lax law enforcement by your department, you tend to do that. Officer Adams had done a quite competent investigation of the lone complaint we had received, and I wanted the Senator to have the “rest of the story.”

In doing so, I collected some data to demonstrate to the Senator that we are hardly shy about citing people for improper registration. In 2008, we issued 14,784 official citations and 5,094 warning citations for registration violations. The warnings generally went to folks who were less than a month overdue on a renewal. The total of nearly 20,000 citations is a whopping number, but I can’t imagine that we actually caught anywhere close to half the violators. My estimate is that at any given time, around 10-15% of all the vehicles in Lancaster County (with a population of about 275,000) are improperly registered.

Each of those violations represents wheel tax, personal property tax, and in some cases sales tax that would either be unpaid entirely or at least delayed. In many cases, cheaters with otherwise legitimate plates are either registering their vehicles in another State where there is a lower vehicle tax, or in another Nebraska County, in order to avoid Lincoln’s $49 wheel tax. We have a few local businesses who have a system whereby their vehicles are registered at business addresses just outside the City limits, yet their fleet lives and works primarily in the City. They avoid City wheel tax by registering vehicles at a rural Lancaster County address.

These cases can be a little complicated because people will lie through their teeth. They tell you they just bought the car, when in fact they are well beyond the 30-day period the law gives you to register a vehicle after purchase. They dummy-up a new bill of sale every few weeks. They tell you the car belongs to their son, who is on active duty in the military and exempt, when in fact it’s their daily driver. They tell you that the pickup is really their farm truck from Burwell, and that it is just here in Lincoln for a couple months. They tell you that they have a vacation home in South Dakota, and that's where they normally keep the RV that's in the driveway. They tell you that they just moved to Lincoln, and will change the registration from Dawson County as soon as it expires, when in fact they have no intention of doing so and have already renewed it twice. They tell you that the car belongs to dear old dad back in Des Moines; they've just borrowed it for a few weeks while they save up money to get the transmission fixed on their own car. Some of these things are easily checked out, others are not--and would require considerable research or weeks of regular surveillance to disprove.

Some people who consider themselves to be upstanding and law-abiding will rail about criminals out one corner of their mouth, complain about their taxes out the other, and all the while think nothing of cheating on their income tax and lying about the tax situs of their motor vehicle to save $50. They normally have plenty of money, by the way.