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1 Million Unpaid Traffic Tickets in County Could Be Eligible For Partial Amnesty Under State Program
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If you have traffic tickets that you haven't paid since 2008, the state wants to help you wipe the slate clean. Starting in 2012, the state will be offering you a 50 percent discount to pay off tickets that were supposed to be paid off in 2009, according to the Daily Breeze.
The state is handing out the steep discount in the hopes of getting something rather than nothing from delinquent traffic tickets that are way, way overdue. Up to 1 million tickets could be eligible for the program in Los Angeles County alone, the paper reports
Traffic tickets — not including parking tickets — that were supposed to be paid by January 1, 2009 are eligible. Scofflaws will have from January 1 until June 30, 2012 to pay off the old tickets.
"If you have a past-due ticket that has not been paid, now would be the time to pay it off and save 50 percent," said Philip Carrizosa, spokesman for the Administrative Office of the Courts told the paper.
It's not clear how much the state expects to get, but the state has launched similar programs in the past. In 2004, it launched a campaign to recoup unpaid state income taxes from 1,138 taxpayers. That program recouped $1.3 billion, according to the Franchise Tax Board.
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