Truckers driving potentially unsafe vehicles after certificate forgery case, OPP says

A 39-year-old man is facing nearly 80 charges after a long-term investigation into forgery of vehicle inspection and safety certificates.

The investigation began in June 2017 after police stopped a commercial truck and found the driver had a fraudulent safety inspection certificate.

"The investigation sort of unfolded from there. The more we dug, the more we unfolded more and more of these safety certificates that were out floating around on trucks that are actually on the road," Waterloo Regional Police Staff Sgt. Mike Hinsperger told CBC News Friday.

Certificates tracked by MTO

Police found a number of inspection certificates and safety standard certificates went missing from a local auto repair shop.

The certificates are legally required by the Ontario Ministry of Transportation to show vehicles are safe and in good order. They are numbered, and auto shops that do safety inspections must record each one, with that electronic record going to MTO. Each certificate is also signed by the mechanic who did the work.

"When these things go missing, now suddenly there's a void of these numbers, so we have an idea of which ones are out there," Hinsperger said.

He said officers believe an employee at a Kitchener repair shop was stealing the blank certificates and forging the signatures of mechanics on the certificates for "personal financial gain."

There were 135 annual inspection certificates and 59 safety certificates missing from a repair shop in Kitchener. The accused also once worked at a repair shop in Palmerston and an investigation is ongoing into how many certificates are missing from there, police said.

Concern for safety

The certificates from the two shops have been linked to eight trucking companies in Waterloo region, Palmerston and abroad, police said.

"These trucks, of course, are out driving around on the roads," Hinsperger said.

"That was probably the most concerning part is that we have commercial vehicles that are out driving around with fraudulent safeties on them, so they hadn't been properly safetied by a legitimate mechanic," he said.

That raises concerns of unsafe commercial vehicles on the roads. Hinsperger said some drivers may not know the trucks they're driving are potentially unsafe, but the companies they work for likely do.

"To me, I don't know how you couldn't know. If you're hiring someone and paying them substandard amounts — everybody knows what it costs to get a vehicle safetied at a legitimate shop — and now suddenly, well, I can do it for a heck of a lot less," he said.

Hinsperger said they have seen similar cases, but never with so many certificates.

A 39-year-old man is facing 76 charges including theft and uttering forged documents.