Driving permit saga...continues

We finally received the bills for extending the 6-month validity of our Californian driver's licenses to a full year in Germany. Both bills were addressed to our residence, but they came about 10 days apart. Mine showed up in the mailbox at our residence, and Glenda's appeared in my mailbox at work (11 km away) ten days later. Glenda never changed her maiden name; thus some of the staff at our residence do not know who "Frau Cheng" is and her mails are sometimes re-directed to the lab's guest service before finding their way to my mailbox at work.

According to the bill, we have a month to dispute the 40€/license fee. So I decided to wait and make the bank transfers** when I make other payments (such as rent) at the beginning of the month. A few days ago, I got two new bills from the licensing office. This time, there is an additional 4€ "Mahngebühr" (reminder fee/fine) per license. So we have a month to dispute the 40€/license fee, but a Mahngebühr is levied two weeks after the bills were issued?

In any case, I paid the fees and the fines without filing a dispute.

**Bank transfer: Almost everything is done by bank transfers here in Germany. I have yet to see a personal or business cheque. The payees give the payers their bank number (bankleitzahl, or BLZ) and their account number (Kontonummer), and then the payers go to the bank or the bank's website to initiate the transfer. When I opened the bank account, I was given a full sheet of randomly generated numbers. During the internet transfers, the central server would ask me to provide a specific "key" from this sheet. This is an extra layer of fraud protection in addition to the password to log into the bank account. Foreigners have to be careful when inputing the payment amount: seventeen Euro and fifty five cents is entered as 17,55 and not 17.55 (comma vs. period).