ACT taxpayers are facing claims of more than $14 million from the victims of unregistered and hit-and-run drivers, with the territory's law-abiding motorists being slugged with higher car registration costs.
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The authority that administers the scheme admits that little progress has been made over the years in retrieving money from offenders because it is not worth trying to make them pay to compensate the victims of their actions.
Instead, more than $20 was added to every car registration bill in the ACT last year to cover the cost of the pay-outs.
The balance sheet of the Office of the Nominal Defendant of the ACT, reveals the true cost to the community of deadbeat motorists, with the office spending $3.3million settling personal injury claims in 2010-11.
The money was paid at an average of $130,000 per claim to compensate victims of accidents where the motorist at fault was driving an unregistered car or where they fled the scene of the crash.
The Nominal Insurer was established in 2008 in an effort to ensure that victims of unregistered and hit-and-run drivers received the same benefits as those covered by the Compulsory Third Party Scheme.
As of June 30, there were 80 claims underway against the Nominal Insurer scheme and the administrators were allowing $14.1million for combined settlements.
The cost of settling the claims is passed on to the territory's only licensed compulsory third party insurer, NRMA, which passes it along to its customers: every vehicle owner in the territory.
Unregistered vehicles accounted for 31per cent of the claims while hit-and-run drivers were responsible for the other 69per cent.
The Nominal Defendants' office has the power to pursue unregistered motorists to make them pay for injuries they cause, but the office only recovered $74,000 from offenders in the past financial year.
The office also recovered just under $5million in levies on commercial insurers and another $500,000 in unregistered vehicle fines, but recovery from ''third parties'' was just $34,000.
In notes accompanying the accounts, the office conceded, for the second year, that in most cases no money can be extracted from the offenders because they have limited finances or cannot be found.
''Where the nominal defendant has made payments on a claim involving an uninsured motor vehicle, attempts are made to recover the cost of those payments from the owner or driver concerned,'' the notes read.
''Although the financial resources of all uninsured drivers are investigated, in the majority of cases, formal recovery action would be futile because the fund is unable to locate the uninsured driver or the uninsured has limited or no financial resources.''
The Government was so worried in 2008 about the rising tide of crashes caused by unregistered drivers that it had authorised police to spend more than $4million on its RAPID roadside detection system.
An ACT Policing spokesman said yesterday that 1772 unregistered vehicles and 780 vehicles without compulsory third party insurance had been detected using the technology during the 2010-11 financial year.
