GSA to develop registration system for government fleet

The program will enable state, federal and local law enforcement agencies to quickly verify the authenticity and ownership of vehicles with government plates, according to Kevin Messner, acting associate administrator of GSA's Office of Governmentwide Policy. Messner said agencies will register newly purchased vehicles this year, and GSA hopes to have all vehicles in the database by January 2009. Although GSA has not seen a troubling trend of illegal use or misrepresentation of government vehicles, Messner said, the agency sees the database as a necessary step. "This was a proactive approach, in the sense that since 9/11 and Hurricane Katrina, there's a need for law enforcement to be able to understand what federal government vehicles are authentic, which agency they belong to and to find the owner quickly," he said. "This is a new world we are living in, and we are reacting to the needs of the new climate." The system, being developed by the Office of Governmentwide Policy and the GSA Fleet Program, will include more than 600,000 vehicles owned by the government as well as a complete inventory of government license plates. The data will be accessible through the International Justice and Public Safety Network (Nlets), a system used by law enforcement agencies to verify license plate information. Messner said it made sense to feed the new information into the existing law enforcement database. GSA has spent the past year meeting with agencies to review security concerns regarding the fleet. As a result, the program includes a redesign of the federal license plate, including the addition of an embossed expiration date. "The big change is the expiration date stamped directly on the plate … so if a plate is lost or stolen, there is a date that will tell law enforcement that this plate is not on the right vehicle, expired or being used for inappropriate purposes," Messner said. The ability to authenticate a government vehicle quickly would prove extremely useful, especially at U.S. borders, he said. The new system also would allow fleet managers to track where their vehicles are deployed and manage them more effectively, though those benefits were secondary to the law enforcement goal.