Woman wins road tax case

A GARVAGH woman, who took on the Driver and Vehicle Agency to clear her name after being accused of not paying her road tax, has had the case against her thrown out of court.
By The Newsroom
Published 13th Aug 2011, 10:10 BST

Margaret Glass (27), of Mettican Road, claimed she had been wrongly accused of keeping an untaxed vehicle for more than two years.

But after taking the stand at North Antrim Magistrates’ Court on Friday to tell her side of the story, a District Judge informed her the charges against her would be withdrawn.

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Glass appeared at Coleraine courthouse to face a charge of using or keeping a motor vehicle after October 1, 2008, “for which a licence under the Vehicle Excise and Registration Act 1994 was not in force.”

A solicitor for the Department claimed the amount of unpaid tax stood at £372.45, covering the period January 1, 2009, to November 30, 2010.

Speaking under oath from the witness box, the defendant told District Judge, Richard Wilson, that she bought the unidentified vehicle on December 3, 2010, and back-dated the tax to the beginning of the month.

She then filled-out the appropriate section on her V5 document and posted it to the DVA, who then accused her of having the vehicle in her possession for a year prior to taxing it.

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“I told them it had 10 months MOT on it when I bought it. They only had to look that up and they would have seen it wasn’t MOT’d by me,” she told the court.

A solicitor for the Department said in light of the defendant’s testimony he was happy to withdraw the charge but added: “We would have withdrawn this sooner if she had produced a receipt.”