The arrest of the director of the national vehicle registration agency in January created a domino effect. In Ho Chi Minh City, half of the registration centers are now operational, workers are forced to work longer hours and drivers queue for days before they can drive legally.
Hanoi () – The Vietnamese government’s anti-corruption campaign has also affected the vehicle registration sector, to the point that the local media are talking about a full-blown crisis. Behind the arrest of Dang Viet Ha, director of the agency in charge of the registration of cars, trains, ships and other means of transport, accused of accepting bribes, more than 500 people were imprisoned and 59 registration centers were closed out of a total of 281 throughout the country, causing various inconveniences to the population. Kilometers of queues formed at registration centers that remained open, and drivers had to sleep and eat in their cars for days, sometimes weeks.
The current situation is a direct consequence of what has happened in recent months: in October, the Ho Chi Minh police stopped a truck and, during routine checks, discovered irregularities in the registration data. The ensuing investigation led to a series of arrests in mid-December, all the way to the top of the national registration centre. In Ho Chi Minh City alone, almost half of the registration centers were closed, and if before the daily inspection capacity was 100 vehicles with 15 workers, now it has increased to 140 with 13 workers.
Employees complain that their shifts have been extended by four more hours (a total of 12 hours of work per day and without receiving a raise), and that their superiors remind them every day not to accept money or gifts. Besides, declared They didn’t know if they had broken a rule or not. As a consequence, inspections have become much more thorough and around 35% of vehicles now fail checks (up from 15% previously), to the point that some drivers have to return up to 7 times before they can drive legally.
It does not appear that the situation will be resolved anytime soon: in Ho Chi Minh City there are 50,000 vehicles waiting to be registered at the end of March, a figure that is expected to rise to 80,000 next month. The city currently has a capacity of about 36,000 registrations per month. And the government has yet to announce if or when the registration centers that closed will reopen.
According to the journalist Michael Tatarsky, “This is just the latest example of how difficult it is to deal with the system of corruption. Cleaning up the registration process is expected to create more transparency (and more safety on the streets?) in the future, but when the whole network is built on corruption, it is bound to collapse when the lubricant that runs it is removed. And, unfortunately, ordinary citizens end up badly hurt by it.”
