A senior citizen may have to wait almost a month for a refund after she claimed a taxi driver overcharged her on a trip to see her husband in a nursing home.
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For the last few weeks Beatrice Komaromy has been catching a taxi between her Albion Park Rail house and the nursing home at Shell Cove to visit her husband.
The trip is around $25 but Ms Komaromy uses a voucher from the Taxi Transport Subsidy Scheme, which pays for half the cost.
Last Sunday, she was driven home by a taxi driver, who said the trip was the usual $25 - but she got a nasty surprise when she checked her bank account the next day.
"I looked on my bank account - he charged me $39.53 cents," Ms Komaromy said.
That's almost $15 more than what she usually paid.
"And it's not even a bank card, it's a debit card. If I hadn't checked I wouldn't have known," she said.
"Maybe he thinks I'm an old person and I'm not going to be looking. To do that, I wonder how many times he does that and people don't know."
Ms Komaromy said she had contacted the Illawarra Taxi Network at least twice since Sunday but, as of Wednesday she had not heard anything back.
Illawarra Taxi Network chairman Mohamad Choubassi said he was aware of the complaint and said it would be investigated.
"The next board meeting is on the first of October," Mr Choubassi said.
"That driver will be brought in to front the complaint board. If she was overcharged she will get a full refund and the driver will be disciplined."
Depending on the result of the investigation, the disciplinary response could be a warning, a fine or even a suspension.
Mr Choubassi said if the claim of overcharging was proven they could also ban the driver from taking passengers to or from the nursing home's address.
He said the technology available in the network's taxis will make it easy to discover what happened.
"Every driver has a PIN number, they start work they log into the system," he said.
"So you bring up that address and you can see which car went there and which driver was in the car.
"We can even track them on the system, where he went, did he go the long way, was there a lot of traffic, whatever. It will give you everything, even the speed of the car.
"And if he used eftpos we'll have a record of that."
Glen Humphries
I'm an award-winning senior journalist with the Illawarra Mercury and have well over two decades' worth of experience in newspapers. I cover the three local councils in the Illawarra for the Mercury, state and federal politics, as well as writing for the TV guide. If I'm not writing, I'm reading.
I'm an award-winning senior journalist with the Illawarra Mercury and have well over two decades' worth of experience in newspapers. I cover the three local councils in the Illawarra for the Mercury, state and federal politics, as well as writing for the TV guide. If I'm not writing, I'm reading.
