The unpleasant surprise you could be getting in the mail
Victorians may soon be forced to fork out cash for hefty fines as the state tries to recoup millions of dollars in parking and speeding tickets.
Significant problems with IT at Fines Victoria have potentially left the state $328million out of pocket – inciting a major overhaul of its infringement system.
Attorney-General Jill Hennessy on Wednesday confirmed she had known of the system's failings for about 11 months.
"I have ordered a review of the Fines Victoria system and I expect that to come to the government within the next few weeks," she told reporters.
Ms Hennessy "weeks ago" appointed an independent advisory board to probe the function of Fines Victoria and to look more generally about the law regarding fines.
Former police chief commissioner Ken Lay chairs the board which also includes former Supreme Court judge David Harper and Julie Fahey, an expert in the IT system.
Ms Hennessy could not say when the entire system would be fixed.
"What I'm committed to is having a system that works and that is fair. But being able to deliver on that, I am not going to make false promises about it. That has been a very complex and complicated process," she said.
"I don't rule out future legislative change and I don't rule out other changes into the future."
Amid the technical problems the government reverted to basics, employing workers to manually process fines and clamp wheels.
Chief Commissioner Graham Ashton said Victoria Police had employed staff specifically to manually process the fines for the past 18 months.
Fines Victoria brought together more than 120 agencies when established.
There is a backlog of about 120,000 reminder notices for unpaid fines issued by courts, which Ms Hennessy hopes will be solved by early next year.
The government insists the debt payment system is still operational and Victorians should pay their fines as normal, if aware of them.
Opposition spokesman David Davis called the situation a "fiasco".
"The wrong people appear to be getting the fines, people are not getting fines when they should be getting fines and the government is not collecting revenue that it should be collecting," he told reporters on Wednesday.
From 2007 to 2015, Victoria paid $59.9 million to Tenix Solutions to build a new system but the contract was eventually terminated without the delivery of software. The replacement VIEW system subsequently failed.
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