When Pennsylvania eliminated the little sticker in the corner of vehicle license plates at the end of 2016, PennDOT said it would save the state as much as $3 million per year. Instead, says State Representative Barry Jozwiak, it is costing the state money because people quickly figured out that they could get away with not renewing their vehicle registrations at all.
Jozwiak says PennDOT collected $22 million less in 2017 than the year before just in passenger car registrations. He plans to introduce a bill to create a new sticker that will cover both a vehicle’s registration and inspection. Jozwiak says similar systems have worked well in Texas and North Carolina.
PennDOT claimed that eliminating the stickers would modernize the registration system since law enforcement in both the U.S. and Canada had access to the electronic database with all of a vehicle’s information, but without a reason to pull over a driver, police officers don’t have a visual cue to suspect a vehicle is not legitimately registered.
