We went and checked the mail today after a few days of not doing so. Our post office box was pretty full, which is fairly unusual. The contents were stuffed in a bag as we had other things to do before we went home. On arrival at home, my partner opened the letters, one of which was addressed to me from the New South Wales government. It was a fine notice for a parking offence in Queanbeyan in early March. The fact that I hadn’t been to Queanbeyan at all this year made me scratch my head in disbelief. Initially I suspected that the fine notice may have been bogus (i.e. a scam) and that the addresses for payment may have been bogus too, simply as a way of extracting cash from the gullible. Then I suspected that someone might have ‘borrowed’ my car while I thought it was parked in the carpark where I work (I know of someone who had this happen to them).
So, I went online to the NSW government website and chased up parking fines and how to dispute them. One of the facilities they have on the website is images of the ‘offence’ when it was being committed. It shows a silver-grey Nissan nose to curb, supposedly in a taxi rank. The fine notice had on it the correct registration number for my vehicle, and the vehicle which committed the offence seemed to have the same registration number (although it is blurred and difficult to be certain). However, my vehicle is a Mazda and is registered in the Australian Capital Territory (ACT), while that committing the offence is registered in NSW, so has a different style of registration plate (in the ACT, the ‘ACT’ is above the numbers, while in NSW, the ‘NSW’ is printed vertically to the left of the numbers).
Given the time of the offence and the fact that the image of the vehicle had the door open and someone who looks like a schoolkid getting out of the car, indicates that the offence took place at school drop-off. After explaining this all to the website for disputed fines, I went and took a photograph of the back end of my car with its ACT registration plate and submitted it to their website.
After submitting the request to review, I received an e-mail to say that my ‘request to review’ had been submitted and that Revenue NSW will “aim to process my review in less than 42 days”. How they could confuse an ACT registered Mazda with a NSW registered Nissan is something I don’t understand. It will be interesting to see what they do.