Ke­jan Haynes

The State is still owed $26 mil­lion in fines for breach of mask reg­u­la­tions dur­ing the COVID-19 pan­dem­ic. Guardian Me­dia learned that on­ly $1,441,000 of the $27 mil­lion-plus ex­pect­ed fines from the tick­ets is­sued has end­ed up in the State’s cof­fers.

This was re­vealed by the Ju­di­cia­ry fol­low­ing Free­dom of In­for­ma­tion re­quests from Guardian Me­dia.

The Ju­di­cia­ry was re­spond­ing to a re­quest for the num­ber of fines paid to the State in re­la­tion to the vi­o­la­tions from Sep­tem­ber 2020 when the Gov­ern­ment first man­dat­ed mask-wear­ing, to Ju­ly 2022 when the mask man­date came to an end (ex­cept for wear­ing masks in health in­sti­tu­tions). Fail­ure to wear a mask came with a penal­ty of $1,000 per in­di­vid­ual.

Ac­cord­ing to the TTPS, by Ju­ly 2022, of­fi­cers had is­sued 27,664 tick­ets for fail­ing to wear face masks, gen­er­at­ing over $27 mil­lion in rev­enue.

How­ev­er on­ly a tiny frac­tion of that mon­ey has been paid, the Ju­di­cia­ry ad­mit­ted.

The rea­sons for the poor col­lec­tion of fines are not as cut and dried as some would think, as the blame can eas­i­ly fall sole­ly on delin­quent mem­bers of the pub­lic.

 But, ac­cord­ing to in­for­ma­tion from the Ju­di­cia­ry, the sys­tem used to col­lect the fines–Court­Pay–is ad­mit­ted­ly con­fus­ing and in­ac­ces­si­ble to large sec­tions of the pop­u­la­tion, es­pe­cial­ly to those with­out cred­it cards or bank ac­counts.

Adding to the con­fu­sion dur­ing the al­ready trau­mat­ic pan­dem­ic pe­ri­od, the Ju­di­cia­ry stopped in-per­son pay­ments of fines at Mag­is­trates' Courts to avoid close in­ter­ac­tions and im­ple­ment­ed the new on­line sys­tem.

All the fines paid so far were through this on­line por­tal since Au­gust 2020.

 "The num­ber of pub­lic health fines paid to the Ju­di­cia­ry for the pe­ri­od Sep­tem­ber 2020 to Ju­ly 31, 2023, is 1,098. The val­ue of Pub­lic Health fines paid dur­ing the said pe­ri­od is $1,441,000," the Ju­di­cia­ry added.

Over the past three months, Guardian Me­dia fol­lowed up on the fines paid for Au­gust, Sep­tem­ber and No­vem­ber.

The Ju­di­cia­ry’s cor­re­spon­dence said be­tween Au­gust 1, 2022, and No­vem­ber 17, 2022, they re­ceived a mere 17 pub­lic health tick­et pay­ments, to­talling $23,000. It gave a break­down of pay­ments for those months. In Au­gust, there were on­ly six fines paid, earn­ing the state $7,000. In Sep­tem­ber, four pay­ments were made to­talling $4,000. Four pay­ments were made in Oc­to­ber, earn­ing $6,000 and by mid-No­vem­ber, on­ly three pay­ments, amount­ing to $6,000. In all, it to­talled $23,000.

The fines paid in De­cem­ber 2022 are still be­ing tal­lied.

Asked if any of the mat­ters in­volv­ing the fines were dis­missed af­ter be­ing ap­pealed be­fore a mag­is­trate, Guardian Me­dia learned that, ac­cord­ing to the new sys­tem, "pay­ment must be made be­fore some­one can ap­peal (chal­lenge) the fine."

Guardian Me­dia reached out to the Ju­di­cia­ry’s com­mu­ni­ca­tions unit on the ef­fi­ca­cy of the Court­Pay sys­tem look­ing at its strengths and weak­ness­es. Apart from be­ing con­fus­ing and in­ac­ces­si­ble to mem­bers of the pub­lic, the Gov­ern­ment made a se­ries of changes to the pay­ments of some fines, in­clud­ing mul­ti­ple ex­ten­sions to the dead­line to pay and re­duc­ing the cost by as much as 50 per cent in some cas­es.

"The con­tin­u­al is­suance of pay­ment ex­ten­sions by Prac­tice Di­rec­tions may have con­tributed to the pub­lic’s un­cer­tain­ty around when and how pay­ments should and can be made. Thus, this has the po­ten­tial to re­sult in un­paid court or­ders and un­col­lect­ed rev­enue ar­rears," the Ju­di­cia­ry stat­ed.

 They said that their analy­sis of cus­tomer calls and queries show the pub­lic was not ful­ly aware of how to make pay­ments since the in­tro­duc­tion of Court­Pay.

Ur­gent need for cash vouch­ers to pay fines, and ads to ex­plain Court­Pay to pub­lic

The Ju­di­cia­ry said there was an ur­gent need for the adop­tion of cash vouch­ers as an al­ter­na­tive pay­ment op­tion.

"While an ap­proach was made to the Min­istry of Fi­nance [...] for ap­proval for the use of the Court­Pay cash vouch­er as an al­ter­na­tive to cred­it card, VISA deb­it card and cash pay­ments over the counter, the de­lay in ob­tain­ing ap­proval has had a neg­a­tive im­pact on the Ju­di­cia­ry’s abil­i­ty to re­ceive pay­ments," the re­port read.

Of­fi­cials al­so be­lieve there needs to be a com­pre­hen­sive com­mu­ni­ca­tions plan to ex­plain Court­Pay to the pub­lic. They rec­om­mend a "blitz" of ad­ver­tis­ing on tra­di­tion­al and so­cial me­dia.  

"The team rec­om­mends the de­vel­op­ment of an of­fi­cial com­mu­ni­ca­tions cam­paign cen­tred on pay­ments and oth­er rel­e­vant e-ser­vices deemed rel­e­vant for mass mar­ket aware­ness and adop­tion."

The hope is to have an easy-to-un­der­stand, "sim­pli­fied, cus­tomer-cen­tric ap­proach to com­mu­ni­ca­tions" where­by the Ju­di­cia­ry can ef­fec­tive­ly ed­u­cate mem­bers of the pub­lic about new and up­com­ing e-ser­vices.

Court­Pay is for more than pub­lic health fines

The pub­lic can use Court­Pay to pay more than pub­lic health fines though. It has been im­ple­ment­ed for pay­ments to­ward court-or­dered main­te­nance and even traf­fic fines is­sued be­fore May 20, 2020.

The Ju­di­cia­ry’s records from one year ago (Jan­u­ary 2022) showed 94,901 fines were on the sys­tem wait­ing to be paid but on­ly 2.6 per cent or 2,518 of those fines were paid. The low­est pay­ments were for traf­fic fines. Less than one per cent of traf­fic fines (218 out of 70,556) were paid, even af­ter the Gov­ern­ment of­fered a 50 per cent dis­count on the fines.  

Court­Pay was first con­ceived in May 2018 when the Ju­di­cia­ry re­ceived ap­proval from the Min­istry of Fi­nance to open a bank ac­count to fa­cil­i­tate on­line pay­ments for Court-Or­dered Main­te­nance. That was ex­pand­ed in May 2019 to open bank ac­counts for oth­er types of court pay­ments. Ac­cord­ing to the Ju­di­cia­ry, it went live with the Court­Pay e-pay­ment plat­form on Ju­ly 1, 2021 "to re­ceive pay­ments for court-or­dered fines, mo­tor ve­hi­cle traf­fic tick­ets is­sued pri­or to May 16, 2020, and pub­lic health fixed penal­ty tick­ets via cred­it card and VISA-en­abled deb­it cards."

The Ju­di­cia­ry has al­so looked in­ward to the rea­sons why the num­ber of pay­ments is so low. The most ob­vi­ous is sim­ple pay­ment eva­sion.

"Some court cus­tomers have opt­ed to de­lay mak­ing a pay­ment even though they have ac­cess to ei­ther a cred­it card or VISA-en­abled deb­it card based on the op­por­tu­ni­ty for de­ferred pay­ment made avail­able by the is­sued Prac­tice Di­rec­tions, al­though there are clear­ly de­fined pro­vi­sions for mak­ing pay­ments,” the Ju­di­cia­ry’s re­port stat­ed.

How­ev­er, of­fi­cials ac­knowl­edged that a ma­jor­i­ty of the "court cus­tomers" are on­ly able to make pay­ments in cash.

The Min­istry of Trade es­ti­mates 19 per cent of the pop­u­la­tion does not have an ac­count with a fi­nan­cial in­sti­tu­tion; on­ly 20 per cent of the pop­u­la­tion has a cred­it card, and 20 per cent of the pop­u­la­tion makes on­line pur­chas­es and/or pays bills on­line.

Dr Teelucks­ingh rec­om­mends a re­turn to N95 mask-wear­ing

Mean­while, Dr Joel Teeluck­isngh is rec­om­mend­ing a re­turn to N95 mask-wear­ing as there has been a surge of COVID cas­es in Chi­na and the Car­ni­val sea­son is up­on us.

A Bloomberg re­port stat­ed that as many as 248 mil­lion peo­ple, or near­ly 18 per cent of the pop­u­la­tion, like­ly con­tract­ed the virus in the first 20 days of De­cem­ber, ac­cord­ing to min­utes from an in­ter­nal meet­ing of Chi­na’s Na­tion­al Health Com­mis­sion.

Dr Teelucks­ingh, an in­ter­nal med­i­cine spe­cial­ist, told Guardian Me­dia last week that it will take more than vac­cines to pro­tect cit­i­zens dur­ing the sea­son.

"The pan­dem­ic is far from over and with the ex­plo­sion, the tsuna­mi of cas­es in places like North Amer­i­ca, Eu­rope and Chi­na, we will ex­pect with glob­al trav­el that Trinidad and To­ba­go will be no ex­cep­tion," Dr Teelucks­ingh said.

He felt that we should con­sid­er a re­turn to the use of N-95 mask­ing,  "high-qual­i­ty masks like N-95s if you’re go­ing in­doors in those high-risk en­vi­ron­ments."

Health Min­is­ter Ter­rence Deyals­ingh asked if there was a con­sid­er­a­tion by the Gov­ern­ment to rein­tro­duce the wear­ing of masks be­yond health­care in­sti­tu­tions, said "No". He said, "The wear­ing of masks is high­ly rec­om­mend­ed as a mat­ter of per­son­al choice, es­pe­cial­ly by the el­der­ly and im­muno­com­pro­mised."