5.3 Scheduled Offences: Overcharging, Refusal and Non-Cooperation

5.3 Scheduled Offences: Overcharging, Refusal and Non-Cooperation

The Passenger-Facing Conduct Cluster

Where 5.2 covered offences about who is allowed to hold and use the licence itself, this section covers a different cluster of scheduled offences: how a driver treats the passenger sitting in the vehicle, and how a driver treats an authorised officer carrying out LTA's enforcement duties. These offences do not involve impersonation or tampered equipment — the correctly licensed driver is operating a correctly functioning vehicle, but is mistreating the fare, the passenger, or the regulator.

Overcharging

Overcharging a passenger by $20 or more is a confirmed 21-demerit-point, revocation-tier scheduled offence carrying a $500 fine — the same top tier as licence misuse and meter tampering. LTA has specifically cited this figure in its public enforcement statements on taxi overcharging, alongside the suspension and revocation thresholds from 5.1, to warn drivers that a single serious overcharge can end a licence outright. The $20 figure functions as a severity line: it distinguishes a substantial, hard-to-explain-away overcharge from a smaller fare discrepancy. The official sources reviewed do not publish a specific demerit-point figure for overcharging below that $20 line, so treat smaller fare disputes as a real, lower-severity scheduled offence category rather than assuming they carry the same 21-point weight, but do not assume they carry zero points either.

Refusal to Carry a Passenger Without Reasonable Excuse

Refusing to carry a passenger without a reasonable excuse is itself a scheduled offence. The reasonable-excuse standard is doing a lot of work here, and TDVL scenario questions lean on it heavily. Excuses that are ordinarily reasonable include genuine safety concerns (an intoxicated or aggressive would-be passenger, a request that would require an unsafe stop), a vehicle that is already at safe passenger capacity, or a request that would require breaking traffic law. Excuses that are not reasonable include the trip being short or unprofitable, the destination being inconvenient for the driver's own plans, or a preference against a particular passenger for discriminatory reasons. The official sources reviewed do not publish an exact demerit-point figure for this offence, so treat it as a confirmed scheduled offence in the same passenger-conduct family as overcharging, without assuming it automatically reaches the 21-point revocation tier the way a $20-or-more overcharge does.

Failing to Cooperate With an Authorised Officer

The third offence in this cluster is failing to cooperate with, or obstructing, an authorised LTA officer, for example an officer exercising powers to examine a public service vehicle. Cooperation means allowing the inspection to proceed, producing your vocational licence or other requested proof (see 5.5), and not evading, driving away or otherwise frustrating the officer's duties because of inconvenience, being late for a booking, or annoyance at being stopped. Obstruction is treated as its own scheduled offence, separate from whatever the underlying inspection was actually checking for — in other words, a driver can be penalised for the obstruction alone, even if the vehicle itself turns out to have no defect.

Comparing Severity Within the Cluster

When Composition Sum Gives Way to Court Action

Recall from 5.1 that every scheduled offence is dealt with through either a composition sum or full court action, in addition to the demerit points. For this passenger-facing cluster, the choice between the two is not simply about the point value: an isolated, moderate overcharge might be resolved by composition, while a pattern of repeated overcharging, a particularly large or deliberate fare manipulation, or a refusal accompanied by aggressive or discriminatory conduct is more likely to be escalated toward court action. Either way, the demerit points still apply on top of whatever penalty track is chosen — a driver cannot avoid the licence-side consequence by accepting the fine, and cannot avoid the fine by accepting the points. Candidates should remember that the point total and the penalty track are two independent tracks that both flow from the same underlying scheduled offence.

Why Reasonable Excuse Is the Exam's Favourite Phrase

A large share of realistic TDVL conduct questions are built around a single fact pattern: a driver does something a passenger doesn't like (ends a trip early, declines a fare, delays cooperating with an officer), and the question asks whether the driver's justification qualifies as a reasonable excuse. The safest general approach is to ask whether the justification is about safety, legality, or genuine capacity (usually reasonable) or about the driver's convenience, profit, or personal preference (usually not reasonable). Applying that lens consistently will resolve most refusal and termination scenarios correctly, even when the exact wording of a specific question is new.

Connecting Back to the Point System

Every offence in this section, like those in 5.2, feeds into the same cumulative demerit-point total from 5.1. A driver who overcharges by $8 on one trip and is separately found to have obstructed an inspection weeks later is accumulating points from two different scheduled offences toward the same suspension bands — the offences don't need to be identical or related to stack toward suspension or revocation.