When Land Transportation Office (LTO) chief Vigor D. Mendoza asked for financial data for possible reform measures to increase the agency’s revenue collections, he could not help but rub his eyes to check if he was just misreading the documents submitted to him.
It was understandable since based on that document, around 65 percent of motor vehicles in the country, mostly motorcycles, are classified as delinquent, or those whose owners either failed or deliberately refused to have their motor vehicles registered.
Delinquent motor vehicles refer to motor vehicles that were not registered on their due dates and based on the LTO data, around 24.7 million of the 38.3 million vehicles in the country classified as delinquent motor vehicles—which means that only around 13.3 million, or 35 percent of the motor vehicles in the country are registered.
If it would translate to revenue losses, Mendoza said around P37.10 billion are to be collected from these delinquent motor vehicle owners in terms of registration payment and penalties.
“Those included in the report on delinquent motor vehicles are those that failed to renew the registration for more than a year. Those which were not registered for less than a year are not yet included,” said Mendoza.
The cut-off date of the LTO report is April 2022, or before the use of the Land Transportation Management System (LTMS) for motor vehicle registration.
The delinquent volumes were counted based on the outstanding delinquent registrations as of April 2022.
“No Registration, No Travel”
On Thursday, Nov. 16, Mendoza directed all LTO regional directors to come up with strategies and measures to strictly implement the “No Registration, No Travel” policy.
Mendoza explained that this is alarming data since based on their assessments, delinquent motor vehicles either have problems passing roadworthiness inspections that include emission testing, and do not have insurance coverage.
“In other words, these motor vehicles are threats to road safety. We have to be very strict in implementing the laws on land transportation not only to make it fair to the law-abiding motor vehicle owners but also for the welfare of the road users,” said Mendoza.
Mendoza there is a need to strictly implement the “No Registration, No Travel” policy since the number of delinquent motor vehicles would increase further if this is not immediately addressed.
“We need to be very strict about this because this is not only about revenue losses, this is also about road safety because the owners of these delinquent vehicles possibly refused to have the registration renewed because of road worthiness issues,” said Mendoza.
“We will not allow this. As motor vehicle owners, they have the obligation to register and renew the registration of their motor vehicles. We will ensure that this obligation is complied,” he added.
Delinquency data
Based on the LTO data, the National Capital Region has the most number of delinquent motor vehicle owners with 4.1 million, followed by Region III with 3.3 million, and Region IV-A with 2.7 million.
In the Visayas, around 1.8 million delinquent motor vehicles were recorded in both Region VI and Region VII while Region VIII has around 758,000.
In Mindanao, Region XI has the most. Number of delinquent motor vehicles with 1.2 million followed closely by Region XII with 1.1 million. Both Region IX and Region X have almost one million each.
Citing the same data, Mendoza said most of the delinquent motor vehicles are motorcycles with 20.15 million, followed by four-wheel vehicles with 4.01 million, and trucks and buses with around 490,000.
Revenue losses
The goal to increase the LTO revenue, according to Mendoza, is to generate more funds that would be used in the government services and other pro-poor programs of President Ferdinand “Bongbong” Marcos, Jr.
Following the review, it was found out that there are around P37.10 billion collectibles from delinquent motor vehicle owners.
Of this figure, around P15.5 billion is the revenue loss for motorcycles, around P18.4 billion for four-wheel vehicles and P3.25 billion from trucks and buses.
Further broken down, the national government will collect P12.36 billion in the registration of all the delinquent motor vehicles.