Back around 18 years ago in Germany, they had this idea of forcing foreign drivers (particularly truckers) to pay a toll fee, and so this elaborate sensor system was put into place, and all truckers had to go and buy this 'kit' which would have a card attached to it, and you'd put 'credit' on the card and you'd be charged x-amount for kilometers traveled on German autobahns (note, it only involved autobahns).
It's safe to say that the idea was great but the companies found various problems and this took an extra three to four years to deliver a working sensor system.
Well....this week, SWR brought up this topic of Maut. SWR is the regional public TV network for southwestern Germany.
An audit firm picked up three years of Maut data and came to figure that there was a OVER-CHARGE of truckers, of a sum of 300 million Euro (roughly 400-million US dollars). It's a fair sum of money.
To be honest, the study only covered three years, so you have to go and assume for the past dozen years....there's probably near one-billion Euro over-charged.
A likely Bundestag investigation? I suspect that this will be one of the top ten things they go after when the summer vacation period ends. But you can figure that it'll take at least 18 months to work up a decade-long study. It would appear, only because of limited journalism over the story, that a lot of this is simply expenses by the commercial company which manages the program and not so much taking money from the truckers.
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