Ministry of Transport strengthens control over the sale of diagnostic cards

The Ministry of Transport continues to fight dealers who sell diagnostic cards without actually checking vehicles. The draft departmental order contains new requirements for TO operators, which, officials expect, will close loopholes for fraudsters. However, not all market participants share the optimism of the authors of the document.

The Ministry of Transport posted on regulation.gov.ru draft amendments to departmental order No. 151, establishing a methodology for calculating the throughput of a maintenance point.

The current rules provide that a company entering the market submits a package of documents to the Russian Union of Motor Insurers (RSA), including the calculation of the maximum throughput of future inspection points. The formula includes, in particular, the number of technical experts simultaneously working on the diagnostic line. The norm was conceived as one of the ways to prevent fraudsters from unlimitedly filling out diagnostic inspection cards without checking the car.

The Ministry of Transport found “shortcomings” in the document. The current methodology, the explanatory note says, allows “individual legal entities” to claim overestimated throughput.

In fact, by “checking” several hundred cars a day in a small room, such companies make money on the illegal sale of diagnostic cards.

Some entrepreneurs substitute in the established formula a deliberately overestimated number of experts (without taking into account the real possibility of placing them on the line) or an increased duration of the shift (without taking into account the limits established by the Labor Code). The Ministry of Transport intends to include in the order a formula for calculating the maximum number of experts, tying this indicator to the number of diagnostic posts, the size of the premises of the point, etc. The document will also include criteria for calculating the working time of these workers.

Sergey Efremov, Deputy Executive Director of the RSA, supported the innovations. According to him, when submitting documents for accreditation, operators often indicate a 24-hour working day: the TC allows this only if they work on a shift schedule, but the PCA cannot track this. As a result, for example, a small maintenance point with one expert gets the opportunity to triple the number of cars checked (with an 8-hour working day – 16 cars per day, in a 24-hour working day – already 48). Mr. Efremov gives another example – a company with a small point declares several diagnostic posts, at which several experts simultaneously check several machines: “But there it is physically impossible in terms of dimensions.”

The authorities have been trying to defeat the fictitious MOT for several years. Most often, scammers use photomontage, when fake pictures of cars that allegedly came for inspection are uploaded to the Unified Information System for Technical Inspection of the Ministry of Internal Affairs. In 2022, the Ministry of Transport introduced the obligation to take pictures of vehicles in the interior of a maintenance point against the background of an expert worker, but scammers have learned to bypass this requirement using Photoshop.

The traffic police, if a fictitious MOT is suspected, checks by cameras whether the car arrived at a specific point, but this practice did not become widespread.

“The measure is not just late and senseless, but also harmful,” Ivan Kekin, head of the technical inspection point in the Krasnoyarsk Territory (operator of Mars LLC), comments on the amendments. “Let’s recall the photos with technical experts. Did it help? Stop selling? No! And now the same thing will happen, because again and again they are trying to fight the effect, not the causes. Bandwidth is just one of the tools. If it doesn’t exist, others will find it. As long as the car owner will offer money for “a piece of paper without a ride”, there will be those who will take this money. However, another representative does not support this view. The new methodology will make it possible to more correctly calculate the throughput capacity of the point, says the head of the Technical Inspection Union, Maxim Byurdyugov, without giving unscrupulous operators the opportunity to overestimate it, which will positively affect the maintenance industry as a whole.

The representative of the Ermak Association, Alexander Vasiliev, agrees that the amendments pursue a “good goal” – to remove scammers from the market. “Their lives will probably become more complicated,” he suggests. “Maybe instead of one big player with a throughput of more than 200 machines per day, we will see many smaller scammers who will be harder to track.” The new order, Mr. Vasilyev fears, may complicate the work of conscientious operators: it follows from the amendments of the Ministry of Transport that all “dead-end” maintenance points (where cars enter and leave through the same gate) will not check more than 16 cars a day, because, according to the new standards , in such premises there can be only one post and, accordingly, one expert.

Ivan Buranov