News from the AP on fraud in Australia:

Under New South Wales state law, if a car owner signs a sworn statement that they were not driving the vehicle when an offense was committed, they can avoid paying speed camera fines, which arrive by mail, and parking tickets left under windshield wipers.

A recent government audit of the excuses given in those sworn statements revealed that 238 motorists had blamed one of two people “a dead man who had, when alive, lived in Sydney and a person living in neighboring South Australia state” Police Superintendent Daryl Donnolly said in a statement.

The curious part of this audit to me is that these sworn statements blamed only two people. How many false statements will go undetected because they only blame a dead person once?

Did the audit search for people deceased at the time of the incident, or just unusually high numbers of incidents per individual? Apparently the police did not try to reach the deceased, or they might have uncovered the scam earlier:

Some 80,000 Australian dollars ($61,000) of fines have been avoided this way in the past three years, Donnolly said.

He did not identify the scapegoats or explain why police had not uncovered the scam by pursuing the pair for the money owed.

The article does not say whether police will now follow-through in a more timely fashion to verify and process a sworn statement, at least to review the validity of the information, or whether the sworn statements policy will be phased out altogether.