{"id":61005,"date":"2026-08-04T12:58:14","date_gmt":"2026-08-04T12:58:14","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/news\/61005\/"},"modified":"2026-08-04T12:58:14","modified_gmt":"2026-08-04T12:58:14","slug":"how-zohran-mamdanis-pied-a-terre-tax-exposed-an-epidemic-of-ghost-cars-instead","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/news\/61005\/","title":{"rendered":"How Zohran Mamdani’s pied-a-terre tax exposed an epidemic of ‘ghost cars’ instead"},"content":{"rendered":"

It\u2019s not an uncommon sight to see out-of-state plates in New York. For one, it is the self-described greatest city in the world, so of course people embark on road trips to see all the sights of the five boroughs. But on the other hand, plenty of those plates are New Yorkers who register their cars in New Jersey, Pennsylvania, or elsewhere specifically to dodge New York\u2019s high insurance premiums, while actually living in and driving around the Big Apple<\/a>.<\/p>\n

In New York City specifically, a Streetsblog<\/a> analysis of city violation data found nearly 21,000 vehicles registered outside the tri-state area (plus Pennsylvania) that picked up at least one violation in the city in every single quarter of the year: a pattern strongly suggesting these cars are actually garaged and driven in New York full-time, with owners registering elsewhere purely to dodge the state\u2019s high insurance rates.<\/p>\n

The City Council\u2019s Oversight and Investigations Division surveyed<\/a> more than 3,500 parked vehicles last year across precincts chosen for high volumes of out-of-state-plate summonses. Of 768 non-New York-plated vehicles found, one in five had mismatched, temporary, or fraudulent \u201cno-hit\u201d plates that don\u2019t trace back to any valid registration. Those vehicles owed nearly two-and-a-half times more in outstanding fines than properly registered cars, and paid only 16% of what they owed, versus 63% for validly plated ones.<\/p>\n

But Mayor Zohran Mamdani\u2019s pied-\u00e0-terre tax<\/a>\u2014a surcharge for anyone who owns a second home in New York valued at over a certain limit\u2014is effectively acting as an extra tax auditor. The question is simple: are you a New York City resident? Then present your driver\u2019s license or income taxes. Did you happen to file out of state though you lay your head in the five boroughs? Technically, that makes you a non-resident\u2014and someone defrauding the city, per the Department of Finance (DOF).<\/p>\n

The DOF has quietly audited residency status for years through the STAR exemption and the Senior Citizen Homeowners\u2019 Exemption, both of which require a property to be the owner\u2019s actual primary residence, and both of which have turned up real fraud when checked. One Comptroller\u2019s audit<\/a> alone found the DOF had improperly granted the senior exemption to properties whose owners had died and to corporations that were never eligible, a loss of at least $59.2 million over five years. The pied-\u00e0-terre tax flips that same question around: instead of catching people wrongly claiming a primary-residence break, it catches properties wrongly claimed as non-primary, to avoid the surcharge.<\/p>\n

What we\u2019re describing here is rate evasion, or \u201cgarage fraud,\u201d a recognized form of insurance fraud nationally, not just a New York quirk. Insurers price premiums based on a car\u2019s garaging ZIP code, since accident and theft risk vary sharply by density, creating a built-in incentive to register a car at a cheaper address than where it\u2019s actually kept. A 2011 New York State Independent Democratic Conference paper<\/a> on the practice found it goes well beyond individual drivers fudging an address: it documented organized rings registering dozens of vehicles at a single out-of-state address, then buying and reselling cheap out-of-state policies in bulk.<\/p>\n

If someone genuinely lives in New York full-time, proving it is simple: a tax return with the address on it settles the question. The letters only become a real problem for someone who filed as a non-New York resident while actually living in the city, exactly the asymmetry being exposed by the Mamdani tax. <\/p>\n

Domestically, it\u2019s not just New York<\/p>\n

New York\u2019s own state government has escalated its response accordingly. Governor Kathy Hochul made ghost plates and out-of-state registration fraud a centerpiece of her 2026 State of the State address, citing an estimated $300-a-year cost<\/a> to every law-abiding New York driver, and has since run multi-agency crackdowns\u2014State Police, DMV, and the Thruway Authority working with local departments\u2014that pulled more than 200 vehicles off the road in a single recent sweep.<\/p>\n

California is chasing a parallel scheme aimed at taxes rather than insurance: prosecutors charged 14 people with felony tax evasion in March 2026 over the \u201cMontana LLC<\/a>\u201d loophole, in which owners register expensive vehicles through Montana shell companies to dodge sales tax and registration fees. Philadelphia, meanwhile, launched a public reporting tool for so-called ghost cars<\/a> and towed more than 50 within two weeks, with officials explicitly framing the issue as a quality-of-life problem that bleeds into public safety.<\/p>\n

In Europe, it\u2019s Italy and France<\/p>\n

The Neapolitan word \u201cfurbo\u201d directly translates to being sly, but in reality, it\u2019s so much more. It\u2019s finding a way to get home after curfew without getting in trouble; of avoiding detention in school; of finding a loophole around a law. <\/p>\n

So that\u2019s why it\u2019s not surprising this whole issue is dubbed in Polish the przekr\u0119t neapolski, or \u201cthe Neapolitan scam.\u201d This week, Polish authorities admitted they\u2019re cracking down on a scheme in which Neapolitan car owners deregister their vehicles from Italy\u2019s public motor registry, have it \u201cexported\u201d to Poland and re-registered under Polish plates through a long-term rental agreement, then get them back, often without the cars ever physically leaving Italy. <\/p>\n

Mandatory liability insurance in Naples, among Italy\u2019s most expensive, can run \u20ac600 to over \u20ac2,000 a year; the Polish-plate workaround drops that to roughly \u20ac350 a year after the first year. It\u2019s been illegal since 2022, when Italy banned residents from driving foreign-plated cars not also registered domestically. But in 2025 alone, Naples province registered 14,066 foreign vehicles, almost all Polish-plated; and nationally, Italy has 68,228 Polish-plated vehicles on the road, concentrated overwhelmingly around Naples.<\/p>\n

Payouts tied to uninsured Polish-plated cars in Italy jumped from \u20ac1.5 million in 2024 to more than \u20ac4.2 million in 2025. Poland\u2019s Infrastructure Ministry is now drafting a reform requiring photographic proof during inspections that a car is actually sitting in a Polish garage. <\/p>\n

The Naples scheme is a story about individual drivers gaming an insurance market. France\u2019s version shows how the same address-arbitrage logic scales into organized crime: the state auditor Cour des Comptes found<\/a> roughly one million illegally registered vehicles currently on French roads, enabled by fraudulent \u201cghost dealerships\u201d manipulating the national vehicle registry for a fee. The report put<\/a> losses at \u20ac550 million in unpaid fees and fines just between 2022 and 2024 alone, and found the same registry fraud used to dodge luxury-car environmental taxes, disguise stolen vehicles, and support drug-trafficking logistics. In New York, with a driver simply registering a Honda<\/a> in New Jersey, they\u2019re part of a greater tax and insurance fraud scheme.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"It\u2019s not an uncommon sight to see out-of-state plates in New York. For one, it is the self-described…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":61006,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_share_on_mastodon":"0"},"categories":[4],"tags":[7582,5127,8,10449,2727,1256,2097,9,8664,4325,7,2099],"class_list":["post-61005","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-top-stories","tag-car","tag-fraud","tag-headlines","tag-insurance","tag-italy","tag-new-york","tag-new-york-city","tag-news","tag-poland","tag-taxes","tag-top-stories","tag-zohran-mamdani"],"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@news\/117037360927433833","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/61005","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=61005"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/61005\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/61006"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=61005"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=61005"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=61005"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}