Remix clone Hacker News

Why would you not just use the odometer reading?

Cars get sold, eventually. You put the odometer reading on the paperwork to transfer the car. Check that against tax records. Purchaser has incentive to check that the recorded mileage is correct, otherwise they’ll have to pay the tax. The odometer is already tamper-resistant. Not perfectly so, and there is fraud, but there is always tax fraud.

▲

Tagbert 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

The reason I have read is that the car can only be taxed within a given jurisdiction. If you travel outside that jurisdiction then the vehicle would not be taxed by that authority. I could be taxed by an authority in another jurisdiction.

The analogy is probably a fuel tax that is paid at the point of purchase.

Still, it seems that we could agree that taxes for a vehicle be paid in the jurisdiction where it is registered and just use odometer readings to calculate the distance traveled.

▲

londons_explore 8 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

> there is fraud, but there is always tax fraud.

It's also a type of fraud which is fairly easy to detect. If a car is recorded as driving just 2000 miles per year, yet freeway cameras detected it driving 100 miles every weekday all year, open a fraud case.

▲

Bluestrike2 2 hours ago | parent [-]

> It's also a type of fraud which is fairly easy to detect. If a car is recorded as driving just 2000 miles per year, yet freeway cameras detected it driving 100 miles every weekday all year, open a fraud case.

Sure, but why bother? That would involve a ton of overhead and server time for a system that's still going to miss a lot of travel, thereby limiting revenue. I question whether the added expense of that kind of surveillance system would even recover enough revenue to break even. The same goes for mandatory GPS reporting devices, plus the civil liberties issues associated with such systems would make passing such a tax even more difficult.

Most countries have some sort of annual safety/emissions inspection, so any mileage-based tax could just use the odometer readings from the inspection. Sure, a mechanic could falsify paperwork, but how likely is that when it'll eventually come to light? If you want to sell the car, you're going to have to eventually admit the miles you hid so that they match the odometer reading at the time of title transfer. That means you're going to have no choice but to pay the tax eventually.

No need to try and build a more perfect mouse trap.

	▲	londons_explore 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Nah - you get citizens to self report odometer readings annually, or use annual inspections. And you employ a few people to run your 'fraud team' which will use CCTV to catch fraud, and auto-mail out letters with fines. 15 peoples civil service salaries = $1.5M say. They will contact local car park owners, municipalities and states who have ANPR cameras, etc. From each, they'll get a spreadsheet of plate no, date/time and camera lat/lon. Many police departments already centralize that info to search for stolen cars etc. They'll then run the whole lot through a python script to make a database of plate num + annual mileage. They'll then compare that to the self-reported mileage and investigate any underreporting. Assume that this is implemented in the USA, and 1% of people fake the odometer by 50%. Assume the tax is 5 cents a mile. Total vehicle miles traveled is 3e12 miles, and assume we can easily detect 30% of offenders, due to them driving long distances on highways, and fine all those detected 3x the fraudulent amount. Total takings: $337M. Clearly worth enforcing.