Yesterday I brought you the news on SunPass billing a year after the debacle began. The FDOT would begin to impose late fees for any back tolls not paid with the conclusion of the June billing cycle. To clarify, the FDOT stated that late fees will only be charged on tolls obtained after June 1st of 2019. A listener asked, has there been any accountability of the vendor or just a cover-up? This is going to be a case of me reporting and you deciding. Has there been accountability? Yes. Will you be satisfied with it? That’s the bigger question.
This whole debacle was a creation of software issues with the vendor for SunPass services, Conduent. Conduent is still the vendor for SunPass and to date has been fined twice by the Scott and DeSantis administrations, totaling $8.3 million. Additionally, the FDOT on Monday mentioned that under the terms of the contract they can impose a maximum 25% penalty on Conduent for billing errors and that’s what they’ve done going back to June 2018. That's another $20 million for a total of about $28 million.
The FDOT has stated that there aren’t new billing issues with the service, essentially everything should be fixed, but there are numerous questions that remain about some of the bills that went out to customers in previous months. Mainly, how can lump payments from the period in question be trusted to be accurate? I don’t know of a single good answer to that. In the electronic age of SunPass, we simply count on it working. There really isn’t a plan B. So, unless you have an especially outlandish bill you know you aren’t responsible for on your hands, there’s probably little alternative you have than paying and moving forward.
As for the $8.3 million in fines paid to the state. I think it’d be appropriate that we credit against accounts known to have been impacted by the debacle in the first place. As of now there’s no indication anything like that will happen.
Photo by: SunPass.com