It used to be so easy. Every January, I’d give my gardener, Pablo, about 700 pesos ($35 U.S.), and he’d go five miles down the road to the tax collection office in Chapala and pay that year’s vehicle registration fee. No appointment necessary. No legal documents were required. All he needed was my license plate number.
January 2025 was a whole different animal. The registration fee was now 900 pesos ($45). That covered the cost of an emissions test as well as the issuance of a new, artistically designed set of license plates. The whole process would include enhanced security features. But I couldn’t receive the new plates when I paid in January. In order to evenly distribute the workload, the agency scheduled everybody according to the last digit of their existing license plate. Mine was a zero. That meant I would have to wait until November to pick up my new plates. We were constantly reminded that failure to complete the process before December 31, 2025 could result in a ticket or, worse yet, vehicle confiscation.
In a further attempt to improve efficiency, you were now required to make an appointment online. That seemed simple enough until you tried to do it. First of all, the appointment web address was 35 characters long. I couldn’t hunt and peck that many letters without making at least two typos. So I asked Pablo to complete the application. But he soon realized that the process was more complicated than just entering my name, address, and license plate number. Apparently the enhanced security features now required information from at least half-a-dozen government documents.
So Pablo suggested we use the services of a nearby cyber/copy store that, for a 150 peso fee, you could make the appointment. All I had to do was bring their cyber guy the originals of all the required documents so he could scan them into the application. When he showed me the list, I told him that I didn’t have an emissions test report. But the cyber guy assured me that people living in the Chapala area were not yet required to have one. It would only be needed if I would be doing a lot of driving in the Guadalajara-metro area. As a Chapala resident, all I needed was my passport, permanent resident card, the original invoice from when I bought the car, a recent electricity bill as proof of residence, the vehicle circulation card, and my RFC number (whatever the hell that is).
I’d never heard of an RFC, and I had never been asked to provide one. Apparently, it is some kind of taxpayer identification number. The cyber guy tried to look up my name on some government web site, but it said nobody by that name has been issued an RFC. He suggested I go home and look through any papers that might have involved paying the government. When I checked all my annual property tax receipts, I found they all had a space labeled RFC, but there was never anything printed in that space. As a last resort, I burrowed through a 6-inch-thick file from when I paid a probate fee to revise the deed to my house after my wife died.
Bingo. I found a government document that listed my 13-digit RFC. But I also noticed that they had misspelled my last name. Instead of Kolczak, it said Kloczak. That solved the mystery of why the cyber guy couldn’t find me listed when he entered my correctly spelled name. But now I worried the misspelled name would prevent me from getting my new license plates.
The cyber guy was finally able to complete the application process. Unfortunately, the Chapala tax office was fully booked until mid-December – a little too close to the deadline. But we were able to book a space for November 21st at the Guadalajara regional office in Tlaquepaque, an hour’s drive from my house.
Pablo and I arrived an hour earlier than our 1:00 pm appointment. The Tlaquepaque office wasn’t a building so much as a vacant lot with 150 folding chairs lined up under a large tent. There wasn’t even a restroom on the premises. For that, everyone was directed to a parking lot down the block that had a pay toilet. (P.S. — Always carry a 5-peso coin in your pocket).
Back at the office, the lady at the information table sent us to the back row of chairs. I never saw or heard anybody calling out names or numbers, but every few minutes, everybody got up and moved over one or two seats. We played musical chairs for an hour and only made it halfway to the front row. When one o’clock came, Pablo reminded the information lady we had an officially booked 1:00 pm appointment. She quickly looked through our paperwork and noticed we didn’t have an emissions test report. He explained we were told that Chapala residents didn’t need one. She said that’s why we should have made our appointment for the Chapala tax office. Everybody that comes to the Tlaquepaque office was required to have one. No exceptions.
So, back to base one. We paid the cyber guy to book us an appointment at the Chapala office for December 15th. Again, we played musical chairs until we finally got to the clerk. As he riffled through the stack of papers, he noticed my original invoice listed both me and my wife as the car’s owners. Where was her paperwork? I explained my wife had passed away four years ago. He said I needed to bring him a copy of her death certificate so he could delete her name from the ownership records.
That meant racing five miles back home, digging through my files for her original death certificate, taking it to a copy store, and then rushing back to the tax office hoping to still be within the allotted time slot for my appointment. By the time we got back, the original clerk had gone on break. The new guy seemed puzzled about why I’d brought my wife’s death certificate but put the copy in my file. Finally, he gave me the damned plates. Mission accomplished.
When I got home, I looked at all the receipts. The good news is they hadn’t misspelled my last name on any of them. The bad news is that they hadn’t included my last name at all – just my first and middle names. My last name doesn’t even appear on my new vehicle circulation card that I’m required to keep in the glove compartment. But my deceased wife’s full first, middle and last names are prominently displayed on all the new documents. Do those sound like an enhanced security features to you?
I hadn’t bothered to take a photo of my car showing the old plate that I could keep as a memento. But, no need to worry. I’ll probably be receiving a nice, clear photo in the mail any day now. I suspect it will be attached to the speeding ticket issued by one of the Foto Infraccion cameras along the highway from when we were rushing to our Tlaquepaque fiasco. And just to make it official, it will no doubt be addressed to my wife.
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