Issues continue for SunPass customers

ORLANDO, Fla. — The Florida Department of Transportation said it doesn’t know when the processing of its toll backlog will be complete.

As of Tuesday afternoon, FDOT had posted more than 167 million transactions. The total backlog of transactions, including SunPass transactions, is 146 million.

Mike DiMauro is tired of hearing about the progress SunPass contractor Conduent is making, he just wants to know when the problem is going to be solved.

“They need to have a deadline in place to let us customers know,” said DiMauro. “It’s affecting me because I need those transactions, especially when I’m on the clock for my job because I need to file them for reimbursement.”

DiMauro said he typically files for reimbursement for tolls as soon as they post to his account, but he’s only now seeing transactions through mid-June.

He said he's being charged for batches of tolls posted at a time, but isn’t able to get reimbursed as quickly.

“I’m worried about once they do post them all, they’re going to try to take money out of the bank and I’m not going to have any money for them to take out the bank,” said DiMauro.

FDOT has repeatedly stated that drivers’ transactions won’t start posting on time until the backlog is reduced.

Channel 9 has twice asked FDOT when that might be. In a statement Friday, they said, “With the continued increase in processing of toll transactions, the department cannot determine a date of completion for the backlog.”

Tuesday afternoon the agency confirmed that answer had not changed.

“I do feel that it’s going to take a while and if it does, I may have to cancel my SunPass account,” said DiMauro.

Conduent started processing the delayed transactions on July 3. As of late Tuesday, they’d processed 167 million tolls in about one month.

That was 9 million tolls posted between Monday and Tuesday, but the backlog was only reduced by 6 million to 146 million.

Each day Conduent works on the backlog, drivers are still going through tolls too.

DiMauro said two months in, he feels it’s time he and other drivers stopped being on the hook.

He created a change.org petition to that effect, asking SunPass to stop charging drivers while their system is down, but he says he’d be happy to just see a discount on what they are charged.

“I feel that the state of Florida should go after the vendor for the tolls and not us SunPass users,” said DiMauro.

Cox Media Group