After a year of technical and customer service problems — that still aren’t completely fixed — Florida will resume paying controversial contractor Conduent for its work on the state’s upgrade of its SunPass electronic tolling system.
The Florida Department of Transportation announced the payment in a carefully crafted news release late Monday, which focused on $3.7 million in new fines, now totaling $8.3 million on a $343 million contract.
However, the news release did not mention how much the state will be paying Conduent for its work over the last year, which had been plagued by billing errors, transaction backlogs, and massive customer service failures. The account disruptions were only supposed to last six days.
“Under the contract and state law, the Department is obligated to compensate Conduent for its monthly operations less any applicable penalties,” FDOT said in its news release. “With that, FDOT is imposing the maximum 25 percent penalty on all monthly payments to Conduent received to date for operation of the system since June 2018.”
It appears the backlogged payments to Conduent could approach $20 million.
Ironically, customers with overdue accounts due to surprisingly large backlogged bills found out last week they will get just three more weeks to pay down their accounts before they are hit with fines and sent to collections.
FDOT officials were not immediately available Monday afternoon to answer additional questions.
This story is breaking; Florida Politics will continue to update it throughout the afternoon.
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