Two weeks ago, The Straits Times reported that 300 motorists a month had problems at the Electronic Road Pricing (ERP) gantries through no fault of theirs. They had a fully stored CashCard, but it was either the card or the in-vehicle unit (IU) that failed to register at the ERP gantries, resulting in them having to pay fines.

The Land Transport Authority (LTA) put the blame on a batch of cards issued in 2006 without the Gemplus logo on the card's chip. But the Network for Electronic Transfers Singapore (Nets), which owns the cards, retorted that tests on its own IUs showed that its CashCards were working fine.

So whose fault was it anyway? A Nets spokesman then suggested that there might be incompatibility issues with some IUs, and said it was working with the LTA on the problem. Two weeks have passed and the problem still persists, and all LTA and Nets can say is that they are 'investigating the cause of these incidents'. No further details were given.