An 86-year-old English woman found herself in a particularly maddening bit of bureaucracy after being convicted because of a one-letter mistake on her car insurance paperwork, according to the BBC.
The woman believed she had properly insured her Suzuki Splash for a full year but somewhere between the forms and the fine print, an “S” in her registration was entered as an “F,” leaving the policy technically invalid and her vehicle deemed uninsured.
That stray letter set off an outsized chain reaction. The woman was prosecuted for keeping a vehicle without insurance, then convicted through the U.K.’s Single Justice Procedure, a fast-track process in which low-level cases are decided privately on written evidence rather than argued in open court. She received a three-month conditional discharge and was ordered to pay a £26 victim surcharge.
As reported, she appears to have tried to do everything right. After receiving a government notice of what was considered a lapse in coverage, she wrote to magistrates explaining that she thought the car was fully insured and had not noticed the registration had been printed incorrectly. Her niece also wrote to say the family was stepping in to help with paperwork, explaining that no one had realized matters had reached a stage where the aunt would have made such an error.
In a final turn worthy of a bureaucratic farce, the DVLA said after the case was highlighted that it would contact the woman to check the insurance paperwork and would seek to have the conviction overturned if the registration typo was the cause.
Based in New York, Stephen Freeman is a Senior Editor at Trending Insurance News. Previously he has worked for Forbes and The Huffington Post. Steven is a graduate of Risk Management at the University of New York.