The government may introduce a new regulation to the Road Transport Act so that auction of seized vehicles can be made easier. This was revealed by The Star newspaper based on the Auditor General’s Report 2017. The Road Transport Department (JPJ) currently has 9,704 vehicles stored within its compounds throughout the country as of November 2017.

5,436 vehicles of these vehicles were seized in five states between 2015 and 2016, with about 1,525 of it were cloned vehicles without proper ownership documents.

“The vehicles represent those that have been seized over the years, but have yet to be released or auctioned,” the report stated. JPJ has formed a task force to look into the matter. One of the delays in disposing these vehicles is in the issuance of the notice of seizures and poor record-keeping of the seized items.

The Auditor-General’s Report stated that the majority of JPJ officers did not utilise the 62 handheld devices worth RM554,640 that were supposed to help issue electronic notice of seizures when enforcement operations were carried out. Instead, based on a sampling of five states, 93.7 per cent of notice of seizures were issued manually.

The Ministry of Transport before this had announced that seized vehicles could only be kept in JPJ compounds for 12 months because of S&P agreement provisions between vehicle owners and hire purchase companies.