Although the administrative authority has the sanctioning power, it inherently involves a procedure to make the sanction or measure effective. Therefore, according to Article 29 of the Constitution, due process must be guaranteed, as well as the principles of legality and publicity. The former is understood as the requirement that the norm must pre-exist the sanction, and the latter means that every administrative act must be notified to the person it affects in the case of a specific administrative act, or published and disseminated to the affected community in the case of a general administrative act.
Based on the foregoing, we must state that the photo ticket or photo citation is a specific administrative act, and therefore it must be notified to the potential offender. This is where the crux of the matter lies, since Law 769 of 2002, in its Article 135, paragraph 5, as amended by Article 22 of Law 1383 of 2010, imposes on the corresponding transit authority the legal obligation to notify "within three (3) business days following the infraction and its supporting documents to the owner, who shall be obliged to pay the fine…" This means that the authority will have only this period to notify the imposition of the citation.
The short notification period is the main cause of the lack of effectiveness of citations, since if they are not notified within this period, they will have no legal-administrative effect. Another obligation imposed by the CPACA is that this notification notice, which is the sending of the administrative act (citation), must contain a complete, authentic, and free copy of the content of the act. This means that the potential offender must be sent the citation, the supporting evidence (the photo of the infraction (photo ticket)), and if not sent in this manner, it will be understood that notification was not made.
In addition to the above, these photo tickets have terms of EXPIRATION and PRESCRIPTION. Expiration occurs when the administrator (the transit authority) did nothing to advance the sanctioning procedure, that is, it did not notify, did not confirm the sanction of the citation, did not advance the coercive collection to execute the sanction. The expiration period provided by law for this case is 6 months, as established by Article 161 of the National Transit Code (CNT). Regarding prescription, we refer to it when the sanction has been imposed and is final, and all steps have been taken to make it enforceable. In this case, the law imposes a term on the transit authority to enforce the sanction, which is 3 years. If after this period the sanction has not been executed (collected), it prescribes, meaning that the authority has lost the opportunity to collect the fine for the infraction.