Jessica Hall is fed up with her charity being ripped off by taxi drivers.Credit:Photograph by Chris Hopkins
Since the Taxileaks series broke on Saturday,this masthead has been inundated with complaints about overcharging.
Jessica Hall,an administrator with the Royal Melbourne Hospital’s Neuroscience Foundation,said she was fed up seeing her organisation – which advances medical research for serious neurological conditions such as dementia and multiple sclerosis – being overcharged,so took matters into her own hands.
“I actually keep a list on my phone of the repeat offenders,and I will check for the taxi plates when I exit,just to see if I can tell someone off ... So I say,‘Hey,do you realise that you are robbing a charity?’” she said.
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Hall said the foundation’s patients were mostly too sick and frail to challenge the cabdrivers ripping them off,describing an elderly woman who travelled from the hospital every fortnight and was getting scammed on “four out of five of her trips”.
Hall said she had spent years crosschecking trips taken by patients,who were given Cabcharge vouchers to cover the cost of travel to and from the hospital,and had lost countless hours trying to claw back costs.
She said at its worst,she would be manually handling 10 disputes at once while A2B was chasing the foundation for unpaid invoices that were being challenged as fraudulent.
Hall said though Cabcharge’s dispute-resolution process had become faster over time,meaning the money was returned sooner,the scams never slowed and still needed constant surveillance.
“[As a not-for-profit],we have to account for every dollar … It all adds up,” she said.
Hall said a favourite method of dodgy drivers was to add an obscure “other” fee to the fare – a scam detailed in this masthead’s Taxileaks investigation.
“There needs to be consequences for the drivers ... It is literal theft,and there just needs to be some more consequences for it,” she said.
In response to the weekend’s revelations,Victorian Premier Jacinta Allan vowed to clean up the taxi industry,saying thatcases involving the rorting and abuse of disabled passengers “disgusts me to my core”.
Allan said the Department of Transport and Planning was looking at enforcing more rigorous checks for driver accreditations.
“The Department of Transport and Planning is undertaking a review,looking at how we can strengthen the procurement practices,strengthen the accreditation practices,and also using technology as well. This is disgusting behaviour,” she said.
Opposition consumer affairs spokesman Tim McCurdy called for Safe Transport Victoria chief executive Tammy O’Connor to be sacked over the saga.
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“It is time for change,” McCurdy said. “Victorians deserve to be safe from abuse and exploitation when they book a cab – and that starts at the top with the regulator.”
Safe Transport Victoria declined to comment.
In NSW,two government officials said the office of the state’s taxi regulator,the Point-to-Point Commissioner,was facing internal claims that it was ineffective and dysfunctional.
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