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The Comptroller of Puerto Rico, Yesmín Valdivieso revealed on Pega’os en la Mañana that they identified some 19 employees of the Driver Services Center (CESCO) who erased their fines in her latest report, which covers the period from January 1, 2015 to June 30, 2021.

“We ran tests, both in the metropolitan center, in the CESCO Bayamón, in the one in Ponce, Aguadilla, Arecibo, Humacao, Barranquitas, Caguas, Guayama, in the Urban one, in Minillas, and in all of them we found at least one employee either erasing their own accounts, the fines that had been issued to themselves, erasing, changing the status of some fines, saying they had been paid at Treasury, and at Treasury there was no record of the payment”, Valdivieso revealed. “And that is from one sample. From the entire universe we took that there were thousands of fines. What we reviewed were 437 fines that were found to be wrong, but they were about 25 thousand, and there thousands of fines come in per year”.

The audit reveals that 47.9 million dollars in traffic fines had not been collected out of 543,711 uncorrected fines as of 2019. The clerk in charge of verifying the digitization process of the tickets by the contracted company and working the tickets with errors, took a leave in September 2017, and upon returning, was assigned to other functions. The report also notes that between 48% and 68% of the 921,322 AutoExpreso fines totaling $29.2 million between 2016 and 2018, were not collected, since the DTOP does not have the mechanisms to identify the drivers of leased vehicles.

“The 47 million, 50 million that were not collected, many of them are because when they digitized the ticket, the handwriting of the person who wrote the ticket could not be understood, so they could not link that fine to a license or to a car, so there you had a digitization problem due to the lack of good handwriting by the police”, the Comptroller explained. “You have a lot of fines that arrive at those warehouses and are not processed immediately. And if you do not process them, that is, you do not record them in the DAVID system, how do you collect them afterward?”

The report of the Office of the Comptroller confirmed that the situations were referred to the Department of Justice and to the Office of Government Ethics (OEG) on February 23, 2022. On December 23, 2024, the then secretary of the DTOP reported that following internal investigations, an employee of the CESCO Metropolitano was dismissed and charges and an intention to dismiss were filed against three employees of the CESCO Bayamón, Caguas and Minillas.