The Straits Times reported on Monday that a parking warden was sentenced to four weeks' jail after she was found guilty of issuing parking summonses to innocent motorists.

Noorasimah Jasman, 33, was supposed to patrol part of Choa Chu Kang's HDB-owned parking spaces to check for parking offences.

Scanning for parking charges

Motorists can now use the Parking.SG mobile app to pay for parking fees instead of physical coupons. Parking enforcement officers are given handheld scanners to check against a database.

Noorasimah was given a handheld scanner on her patrols. Her job was to key in the registration plate of the car she was checking to see if the car had valid season parking or had paid parking charges.

However, ST reported, and the court found, she did not do so. Instead, she keyed in car plate numbers of cars that were not necessarily even in the parking spaces she was supposed to check.

Her ruse was uncovered when one of these motorists made a police report after receiving a fine for an alleged parking offence during a period where no one had driven her vehicle.

Noorasimah was then caught, by which time some 16 other unsuspecting drivers had paid up a total of S$304 in fines they shouldn't have been charged — these were voided and refunded to them.

Car-checking quota

ST reported that Noorasimah had a quota.

The second paragraph of its article caught the attention of readers:

"To make them believe she was fulfilling her daily work quota, Noorasimah Jasman entered the registration numbers of vehicles without season parking tickets into an electronic record system, despite not knowing if they were even parked in the area she was meant to be patrolling." (emphasis ours)

Unfortunately, several readers may have missed this paragraph further into the article:

"She was required to check at least 60 vehicles per carpark in order to meet her daily work quota. However, Deputy Public Prosecutor Alfie Lim said that there was no quota on the number of summonses issued." (emphasis ours)

Singaporeans confirm widely-held conspiracy

It's been a running conspiracy that parking enforcement officers in Singapore have a quota of summonses that they have to meet daily.

In 2014, there was even a blog that interviewed an officer who debunked the myth that they received commissions from summonses issued.

Despite this, some Singaporeans were happy to connect a series of dots of their own doing:

One even managed to twist logic to fit his own narrative:

We will just leave this here:

[related_story]

Top image via Christian Chen

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