By: Ranen Salikram / Candidate Attorney / Mooney Ford Attorneys
One of your drivers picks up a speeding fine on the N2, caught by a fixed camera during an ordinary Tuesday afternoon delivery. Nobody thinks much of it until, six weeks later, a letter arrives, not addressed to the driver, but to the company. The vehicle is registered in the business’s name, and under the law that commenced on 1 July 2026, the business is now the party the Road Traffic Infringement Agency wants to hear from. HR’s instinct is to call the driver in and dismiss him for embarrassing the company. That instinct reaches for the wrong tool, in much the same way that “it wasn’t my fault” reaches for the wrong argument in a car rental dispute. The question here is not really about fault. It is about who the statute now requires to act, by when, and what actually follows, in law, once that deadline is missed.
The Notice That Now Comes to You
Phase 2 of the Administrative Adjudication of Road Traffic Offences Act 46 of 1998 (AARTO) commenced on 1 July 2026 in more than sixty municipalities, including eThekwini, under Proclamations 322 and 323 of 2026. Where a vehicle is registered to a company, an infringement notice is now served on the business itself, through the particulars recorded on eNaTIS, and is deemed served ten days after posting whether or not anyone in the business has read it yet. From that date, the business has 32 days to pay at a discount, apply to pay in instalments, make representations, or nominate the actual driver on the prescribed form. Nothing is done, and a courtesy letter follows; from that point nomination is no longer possible, and the company remains liable for the fine at three times the ordinary rate, as the Act provides for juristic persons. This is new machinery, not a new verdict on anybody’s driving. The Act has introduced a filing deadline. It has not introduced a disciplinary finding.
Nominating a Driver Is a Filing Obligation, Not a Verdict
Faced with a notice, the company’s first decision is whether to nominate the person who was actually driving. This is a statutory duty, not an accusation. Where the company’s records show who was driving, an accurate nomination is simply what the law requires, applied consistently regardless of the driver’s seniority. It moves the statutory liability, and in time the demerit points, to the person the Act says should carry them. It says nothing at all about whether that person has done anything wrong in the eyes of the company. Whether the underlying conduct also amounts to workplace misconduct is a separate question, governed by the ordinary principles of labour law, which AARTO leaves entirely untouched.
When a Fine Becomes a Disciplinary Matter
Item 3 of Schedule 8 to the Labour Relations Act 66 of 1995, the Code of Good Practice: Dismissal, requires discipline to be applied progressively, reserving dismissal for serious or repeated misconduct. An ordinary infringement committed on company business, moderate speeding, a parking contravention, a minor licensing lapse, will rarely on its own justify dismissal, and a sanction that a reasonable decision-maker could not have imposed will not survive review, per the Constitutional Court’s approach in Sidumo and Another v Rustenburg Platinum Mines Ltd. The point is illustrated well by the CCMA’s own reasoning in NUM obo Khanye v South African Region Business Services (2001) 1 BALR 92, where an employee dismissed for driving a company vehicle without a valid licence, and damaging it in the process, was reinstated because the circumstances (a workplace emergency that led to the unauthorised use) made dismissal too harsh a response. A genuine rule violation, even one involving a vehicle, does not dismiss itself. The circumstances of the specific incident, and the employee’s own disciplinary history, remain decisive, exactly as they would in any other misconduct enquiry.
The Conduct That Actually Sinks Employees
The infringement itself is rarely what ends an employment relationship. Concealment is. An employee who hides a notice addressed to them, denies having driven the vehicle when the records show otherwise, or simply lets the 32 days lapse so that the company absorbs a tripled penalty, has not committed a traffic offence against the company; they have lied to it. South African labour law has long treated dishonesty as capable of destroying the trust at the centre of the employment relationship, justifying dismissal even on a first occurrence where the deception is material. Unlike an ordinary infringement, concealment stands as a misconduct case in its own right, independent of how serious the underlying driving was, and will usually justify dismissal after a fair hearing.
When the Fine Becomes a Capacity Problem, Not a Conduct One
The provisions creating the demerit points system, sections 24 to 28 of the Act, were expressly excluded from the July 2026 commencement, and remain earmarked for the national rollout expected in 2027. When they do commence, repeated infringements will begin to carry points, and enough points will suspend a driving licence by operation of law. At that moment the analysis changes character entirely. The employee is not refusing to drive. They are no longer legally permitted to. Commentators writing on AARTO’s employment consequences have long recognised this as a form of supervening impossibility of performance, to be handled as an incapacity dismissal under the Labour Relations Act rather than as misconduct.
The distinction is not academic, and the courts have already drawn it in analogous settings. In FNB v CCMA and Another (JR1476/2016), the Labour Court held that where an employee’s continued employment is rendered impossible by an inability to meet a legislatively imposed requirement, the employer must follow the general incapacity procedure in Schedule 8, not the operational requirements process in section 189. And in an analogous case concerning a different statutory prerequisite, the Labour Appeal Court in Solidarity v Armscor treated the loss of a security clearance as incapacity, yet set aside the resulting dismissal because the permanence of the incapacity was unclear and the employer had moved too quickly. A three-month suspension is not a cancelled licence, and an employer who treats the two identically, without first investigating the duration, the prospects of review, and the alternatives genuinely available, will not survive that scrutiny either.
What This Means for You
If your business operates any vehicles at all, the practical lesson has two parts. Build the record-keeping now, before demerit points make the stakes personal to your drivers rather than merely financial to the company: know who was driving which vehicle, on which date, and keep that record verifiable. And keep the statutory decision and the disciplinary one in separate lanes. Nominating a driver accurately is not an act of discipline and should never be treated as one; disciplining an employee for the underlying conduct, or for concealing it, is a decision that stands on its own, and must be reasoned and proportionate on its own facts. A single infringement will rarely justify dismissal. Concealment very often will. And a suspended licence calls for a fair process of investigation and consultation before dismissal is even on the table, not an automatic termination the moment the letter arrives.
Because once the 32 days have passed, “it was just a traffic fine” is, in the eyes of the law, very often beside the point.
