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Two hundred and eighty-three vehicles have been impounded for using fake registration numbers in a joint exercise by officials of t he Driver and Vehicle Licensing Authority (DVLA) and the Ghana Police Service. The task force also intercepted 71 vehicles with expired roadworthy stickers with 14 others using fake stickers. The Greater Accra Regional Licensing Officer of the DVLA, Mr Abraham Tetteh, who disclosed this to the Times in Accra yesterday, said the action followed reports that some vehicle owners were flouting the law. He said DVLA engineers and the police undertook the exercise between July 21 and October 20 this year. Mr Tetteh said the authorities had also detected that vehicle owners flout laid-down procedures to covert a vehicle from private use to commercial and vice versa by circumventing the process. The procedure is that to covert a private vehicle into commercial use, the owner only has to notify the DFLA for the documents covering the vehicles including the number plate for it to be changed. Mr Tetteh said 41 private vehicles had been impounded for not complying with the procedure in the conversion process. He explained that white number plates are for private vehicles, red for diplomatic vehicles while yellow are mend for commercial, �but the situation now is that, some vehicles owners convert their number plates from private to commercial without changing the records at the DVLA.� Mr Tetteh said the defaulting vehicle owners were subsequently handed over to the police for prosecution for allegedly taking the laws into their hands by not notifying the DVLA. He said in the case of private cars, the colours of the vehicles are also changed from their original colours to taxis. Mr Tetteh said in that exercise most of the vehicles intercepted were private vehicles some of them not even painted. �The right thing to be done was for the owners of the vehicles to notify the DVLA of the conversion so that we can facilitate the changing to the documents,� he said. Mr Tetteh explained that in such conversions, every document covering the vehicle have to be looked at to ascertain if they matched the chassis numbers and other features on the vehicle. He said sometimes information embossed on the vehicles, in terms of the addresses are not correct, thereby posing problem for occupants in times of unforeseen circumstance such as accidents. He said 42 drivers were also arrested for driving under weight vehicles, 31 for using tainted glasses and 11 without driving licenses. Throwing more light on the underweight vehicles, Mr Tetteh said in some instances prospective drivers are given specific classes of licenses which allow them to drive a particular class of vehicle depending on the number of years or experience of the driver but in the case of the 42 people arrested, they were caught driving vehicles that their licenses did permit them to drive. Mr Tetteh said some of them also have had their licenses altered, with some tearing apart or have been fidgeted with some figures or words missing.