The Land Transportation Office plans to shorten the examination for driver’s license applicants to eliminate the reliance on fixers.
LTO chief Jay Art Tugade acknowledged that the lengthy procedures is one of the reasons many driver applicants resort to patronizing fixers.
Tugade, after learning that the exam takes an hour to complete formed a committee to analyze the questions and instructed them to condense the content without sacrificing the purpose which is to license competent drivers with emphasis on knowledge, skills and attitude.
“The instruction I gave to our committee was to compress the exam. This exam reportedly takes about an hour. The agency is now studying how to shorten the exam,” Tugade said.
“I believe that by reducing the exam duration, our applicants will not seek out fixers and will opt to take the exam themselves,” he said.
Tugade said some applicants of student permit were paying as much as P15,000 without undergoing training and studying the basic traffic rules.
Among the exams being studied are for those obtaining a new non-professional license, new conductor’s license, changing classification from non-professional to professional and adding driver’s license code.
The committee is also studying to make the questions “customized,” depending on the license classification or driver’s license code the applicant is applying for.
The LTO and the Criminal Investigation and Detection Group arrested five suspected “fixers” outside the LTO Novaliches District Office in Quezon City in March.
The LTO earlier said it accelerated the digitalization of its services to fight fixers and corruption in the agency.
