They thought their toll charge nightmare was over. Then NTTA billed them again
The Star-Telegram has once again stepped in to help a Tarrant County couple deal with toll road bills they received for cars they do not own.
In February 2024, a Star-Telegram reporter helped Dale and Anne Smith of North Richland Hills bring what they thought was an end to a 17-month ordeal with the North Texas Toll Road Authority. They had been billed over $1,000 for tolls on 11 cars that weren’t theirs, but try as they might, they were unable to resolve the issue directly with the NTTA.
The NTTA is a governmental organization that operates toll roads in North Texas.
The Smiths began receiving NTTA bills for cars they did not own in October 2022, and over the next year and a half, the total came to $1,065.
As with this most recent bill, the toll authority told them they had to prove that they did not own the cars.
“We wrote them a letter, and nothing was happening,” Anne Smith said about their first experience in a recent interview. “I was losing sleep over this. We were getting all kinds of notices at this point from collection agencies.”
It wasn’t until after a Star-Telegram reporter inquired about their situation that the NTTA canceled the bills. The cars belonged to a different Dale Smith who works as a used car salesman in Arlington, according to a police report reviewed by a former Star-Telegram reporter.
“I got a call that night, and it was actually the first time anybody from NTTA had ever called me to say, ‘Just throw away all those notices. We’ve made this go away, and we promise it won’t happen anymore.’ I was like, praise God,” Anne Smith said of her experience last year.
But the nightmare recently threatened to start all over again when the North Richland Hills couple received a new bill and an accompanying late fee totaling $71.02.
When she called NTTA, Anne Smith was told she would have to write a letter explaining the situation and email it with copies of the new bills. She recoiled at the thought of getting into another back-and-forth with the toll authority, and her previous experience gave her little faith that her efforts would even be fruitful.
“They leave it to us to do all the work,” she said. “It’s just been such a hassle. I just don’t understand why.”
After the Star-Telegram inquired about the Smiths’ situation this week, NTTA spokesperson Michael Rey said the new bill had been removed from the organization’s system and that they could disregard it.
How was family incorrectly billed by the NTTA again?
The NTTA uses the Texas Department of Motor Vehicles’ database to locate toll road users who do not have a toll tag. When an invoice comes back from an address as undeliverable, they use a process called “skip tracing” to find a new address to send a bill to.
This process uses multiple data points to locate a person, not just the name, Rey said in an email exchange. And while the NTTA uses the DMV’s database information, it has no control over the creation or curation of it.
After the Star-Telegram first inquired about the Smiths’ bills, the NTTA put a block on skip tracing for their address in the DMV system in hopes that it would prevent recurrences. The bills were sent to their home after bouncing back from a Colleyville company with an address that was either invalid or fictional. It was also possible that the company had moved or that the address existed, but did not accept mail for whatever reason.
“That wasn’t the right way to do it,” Rey said. “We incorrectly entered the info in reverse.”
Instead, they should have blocked the incorrect address, not the Smiths’.
“Simply put, we should have blocked traces from the address we were skipping ‘from,’ not the address that … we were skipping ‘to,’” Rey said. “It speaks to the complexity of this issue. Same name, common name, 2.5 miles from the address that comes back as ‘bad.’ Those are compelling inputs.”
When asked why the Smiths had to come to the Star-Telegram again to get the issue resolved, Rey said: “We should have taken into account previous contact with the Smiths. There are notes on the Smiths in our system that should alert agents to what to be aware of.”
The NTTA urges agents to escalate customer concerns through the organization to come to a resolution, he said.
