Driving tester arrested in fraud inquiry

West Auckland police yesterday arrested a driving tester in what they indicated could become a long investigation into allegations of licensing fraud.

The man, said to be a former traffic officer, will appear in the Waitakere District Court this morning charged with using a document, in relation to a complaint from Land Transport New Zealand.

He is understood to be a contract tester based at the Westgate AA Express licensing centre but employed by a private company, NZ Driver Licensing (1998), which is responsible for running all practical road tests for Land Transport NZ - a Government agency.

A police spokesman would not discuss a joint investigation with Land Transport except to say it could be a lengthy operation.

NZ Driver Licensing's managing director, Roger Marley, said the tester was one of just over 100 employed nationally.

Mr Marley, a former police inspector, acknowledged that testers were occasionally offered bribes, but said they were under instructions to end a test immediately if that happened. There had been no previous evidence any were accepted.

Although the current investigation is into allegations of fraud within Auckland's Asian community, Mr Marley said bribes had been offered by people from various walks of life, including 80-year-olds required to sit refresher tests.

The Westgate centre issued a licence to an Asian woman without her having to sit a road test. She had already failed a practical test that she sat legitimately, for not stopping at give-way signs.

The woman volunteered to take a secret television camera to a meeting with a Chinese driving instructor at a private home.

TV3's Campbell Live programme gave the woman $400 to buy the licence, money which the instructor said he would split with a friend who was a testing officer.

The woman claimed to know three others who had bought licences, one of which was issued from Westgate and two from other Auckland centres.

Land Transport NZ insisted it had been investigating allegations of licence fraud for several weeks, and its decision to call in police had nothing to do with the TV3 expose.

Transport Safety Minister Harry Duynhoven rejected a claim by National's Asian affairs spokeswoman, Pansy Wong, that the Government ignored complaints circulating "for years" in her community about "outrageous scams" advertised in a Chinese-language newspaper. He said the only complaints received by Land Transport NZ related to driver training rather than testing, and just one was found to be valid.

Another Chinese instructor said at a meeting with Mrs Wong yesterday that he had raised concern over 18 months ago about an advertisement placed by the instructor exposed by TV3, offering licences without any need to sit tests.