SunPass– Problems with billing fixed or covered up?
Bottom Line: Yesterday I brought you the news that fix or no fix, a year after the SunPass billing debacle began – FDOT would begin to impose late fees for any back tolls not paid with the conclusion of the June billing cycle.To clarify FDOT stated that late fees will only be charged on tolls obtained after June 1st of 2019.A listener asked a good question. 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 totaling $8.3 million by the Scott and DeSantis administrations. Additionally, 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.
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’d gone 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 question. 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’d think it’d be appropriate if that we credited 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.