The Transport Authority (ADT) this evening apologised for having suspending the SMS emissions reporting system and said that once a new system for the processing of the reports was in place, all those vehicles reported in the past few months would be called in for testing.

The Auditor-General revealed in a report to Parliament earlier this week that no vehicles reported by SMS were called in for emissions testing this year.

"Prior to the audit and the eventual publication of the National Audit Office (NAO) report two years down the line, the ADT had already been reviewing the filtering process of the SMS reporting scheme and was working on the creation of an automated filtering system," the Authority said.

"The initiative to effectively review, revamp and automate the manual and time-consuming SMS filtering process, which led to the temporary suspension of the SMS-generated emissions tests had, in fact, been brought to the attention of the NAO throughout discussions held between the two parties during the audit. This iniative was however opportunely not mentioned in the NAO report.

"While the ADT apologises for having had to temporarily suspend the SMS-generated emissions tests, it feels obliged to point out that, for the duration of the suspension of the SMS-generated emissions tests, vehicular emission testing was still and is still being carried out through VRT testing, road-side and random checks on private, passenger-carrying and goods-carrying vehicles (including public transport buses, coaches, trucks, heavy vehicles)."

The ADT said the road-side inspections on coaches and buses yielded the following results:

The ADT said that once the new automated system was in place, it would be calling-up for emissions-testing all those vehicles for which three or more SMS reports were received over the past months.

It urged the general public to continue sending reports on 50611899.