North Carolina drivers who haven't had a ticket in years are being denied new licenses because their names have popped up in a national computer database that has flagged 42 million Americans as "problem drivers."

States are supposed to use the National Driver Register to warn each other about dangerous drivers who lost their licenses for impaired driving and other motor vehicle offenses.

But the register also penalizes good drivers for unresolved paperwork that is sometimes decades old. Some motorists describe the register as a blunt instrument that combines the clumsy weight of 50 state bureaucracies.

Greg C. Wait was a 20-year-old sailor when he got a ticket for driving drunk in upstate New York. He paid a fine and lost his Illinois license and his New York driving privileges for a year.

That was in 1983. This year, three states made him pay again.

Wait has a record of safe driving since he moved to Raleigh in 1996. But, citing objections from New York and Illinois, the N.C. Division of Motor Vehicles refused to renew his license in September when he turned 45.

North Carolina DMV officials do not tell drivers that they check the National Driver Register for every one of the 2.5 million licenses they issue each year. Under state and federal law, if another state says your license there is revoked or suspended, you must clear your name before North Carolina can issue a new license or renew your old one.

North Carolina motorists have to cough up forgotten fees, pay off disputed tickets and then wait for the paperwork to go through before they regain the privilege to drive.

"Is this to generate revenue," Wait asked, "or to keep the highways safe?"

Some drivers admit they are guilty of failing to pay for speeding tickets in other states. But sometimes their problems have nothing to do with their driving.

Before Robert Chasse of Apex could get his North Carolina license in October, he had to pay New York $50 for plates he does not recall having kept when he left the state for Illinois in 1997.

"I agree with the concept of the National Driver Register," said Chasse, 61. "Some of the details are not always logical."

States began putting information into the National Driver Register in the 1980s, but North Carolina then checked only its applicants for new licenses. In 2003, federal auditors told North Carolina to start checking the database for duplicates and renewals, too.

Pay up -- or walk

Wait's license was due to expire in September. After 11 years as a North Carolina driver, he thought his trip to the DMV office would be routine.

"Then the guy said, 'Have you ever been in Illinois?' " Wait said. "I said, 'Yeah, 24 years ago, when I was in the Navy.' "

He had been on leave in New York, with an Illinois license, in 1983 when he was arrested and convicted for DUI. He was still in the Navy in 1984, serving in Australia, when Illinois and New York offered to reinstate his license and privilege.

He says he did not receive their letters and did not need an Illinois license again, anyway.

This year, N.C. DMV officials told Wait to settle his accounts with both states. He telephoned the Illinois DMV, which demanded a $70 reinstatement fee.

"They said, 'You pay the $70, or we don't remove the block from the National Driver Register,' " he said. "So I paid it."

New York officials accepted his $25 reinstatement check but said they would take up to two months to process it and clear his record.

"I quit drinking in 1984," said Wait, who works as a technical writer in Research Triangle Park. "Didn't I pay for this stuff when I was younger?"

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