Abstract
The primary source of funding for the United States’ transportation system is derived from motor fuel and other highway use taxes. Loss of revenue attributed to fuel-tax evasion has been assessed to be somewhere between $1 billion per year, or approximately 25% of the total tax collected. Any solution that addresses this problem needs to include not only the tax-collection agencies and auditors, but also the carriers transporting oil products and the carriers’ customers. This paper presents a system developed by the Oak Ridge National Laboratory for the Federal Highway Administration which has the potential to reduce or eliminate many fuel-tax evasion schemes. The solution balances the needs of tax-auditors and those of the fuel-hauling companies and their customers. The technology was deployed and successfully tested during an eight-month period on a real-world fuel-hauling fleet. Day-to-day operations of the fleet were minimally affected by their interaction with this system. The results of that test are discussed in this paper.
