Malta’s local enforcement agency is struggling to collect pending debts from unpaid contraventions prompting criticism from the National Audit Office for its “lenient” approach especially on repeated offenders who default on payment agreements. This state of affairs is likely to stir a sense of resentment among law-abiding citizens who might perceive such approach as akin to double standards, with the enforcement authority being strong with the weak and weak with the strong.

Criticism on LESA’s lenient approach was levelled in a follow-up report on an audit which the NAO had carried out in 2019 which had flagged various shortcomings, particularly €9 million due from outstanding debtors.  

Four years down the line the NAO pointed out that insignificant progress had been registered on key issues like difficulty in collecting long-outstanding contraventions, addressing disparities between outstanding balances and agreements in place for the respective payments and cases in which agreed payment terms were not being honoured.

Long standing Contraventions

In 2019 the NAO had flagged that in the four-year period between LESA’s inception and December 2019, over €6 million of pending fines out of €56.2 million issued had been pending for more than a year.  Consequently, the authority had been encouraged to assess the situation and take necessary action by initiating discussions at Ministerial level to devise stricter enforcement mechanism for the collection of pending fines, especially where there was no possibility of further penalty enforced for non-compliance.   

It transpires that in June 2020, LESA introduced the option of debt collection contracts spread over payment instalments for up to 12 months. However, the restriction to renew the vehicle licence is lifted after the first instalment.  Through this possibility, the agency recouped just €100,000 up to November 2022. Evidence of the poor progress was the fact that out of a sample of 16 debt collection agreements, the Agency was still quite lenient with defaulters as no concrete action was taken against those who failed to abide by the agreed terms. Unsettled balances, even those falling beyond the lapse of 12 months covered by the agreement, were not always followed up. Moreover, at times, final payment notices were not forwarded to the correct address, thus it was highly likely that the defaulter was not in receipt of this ultimate reminder. If not adequately addressed, the amounts in question will remain uncollected, the NAO concluded.

Disparity between outstanding balances payment agreements

In 2019 the NAO had discovered that only 3.25% of outstanding contraventions were supported by payment agreements meaning that out of €7.9 million due only €257,000 were covered by such agreements. At the time it had been noted that no plausible explanation had been received for this disparity.

It transpired that by November 2022 the agency had 446 payment agreements which were open with the aim of recouping €1.03 million in pending fines. However, when considering that the level of outstanding fines had exceeded €18 million, even LESA admitted that this was a slight improvement.

Payment agreements not being honoured

As described earlier, the NAO had flagged that the payment agreements with vehicle owners who had a long list of contraventions were not being honoured. Four years down the line the NAO noted that with the exception of one instance, payment terms agreed by the 16 sampled defaulters were not adhered to. Thirteen of these agreements were dated in 2021 or before, thus expected to be fully honoured by end of 2022. It was further noted that, 12 of the aforementioned sampled agreements were followed by payment notices, indicating the initiation of legal action if the respective pending balances were not honoured by the prescribed date. Yet, despite that payments remained pending, no corrective action was taken. It was confirmed that legal action was only initiated against top offenders.