Pretty interesting story from WUSA9’s Bruce Johnson. At least five D.C. DMV inspectors have been fired for accepting small cash bribes from cab drivers looking to sail through the inspection process despite deficiencies in their vehicles. Johnson’s got photos, presumably taken by honest DMV employees, of the interiors of several taxis where drivers leave between $20-$50 for inspectors, hoping they’ll look the other way. One inspector he quotes in the story estimates 70 to 80 percent of cab drivers offer bribes to DMV employees. Guess that helps explain why so many D.C. taxi cabs are in such bad shape, yet still operating legally.

One major issue not addressed in this story: Mayor Fenty is proposing doing away with vehicle safety inspections altogether in an effort to trim the budget. Now, it’s hard to say whether cab drivers are more often offering bribes to get out of vehicle safety or emissions inspections—emissions inspections would stay under Fenty’s proposal—but it’s easy to worry about how much worse the city’s cab fleet might end being if they can just skip the safety inspections completely. Then again, if so many of them are already successfully bribing inspectors, maybe it doesn’t make much of a difference.