Record keeping flagged by auditor
The third-party auditor called in by the state found numerous problems with the RMV’s response to the record-keeping scandal, saying in a report the agency continues to miss opportunities to suspend licenses for alcohol-relation violations.
The state-commissioned Grant Thornton preliminary report, issued Friday, cites five additional boxes found with alcohol-related offenses that were not processed, four “egregious” notifications in a separate box that were labeled nonegregious and other, unquantified notifications that were not processed the way the RMV said they would be.
The RMV has since gone through the boxes mentioned in the report, according to a MassDOT spokesman. However, the agency would not answer questions about when they found out about the additional boxes and how long it took to process them.
As part of its top-to-bottom review of the Registry, Grant Thornton began “haphazardly” testing samples of paper out-of-state notifications to double check on the RMV’s remediation process, according to the report. During that testing, which is still underway, the audit firm found three separate issues.
First, investigators found five boxes of notifications labeled with dates of 2017 and 2018 that “appear to not have been included” in the clean-up process. Grant Thornton notes in the report that these boxes include “A” ACD codes, which are alcohol-related offenses in other jurisdictions.
Second, Grant Thornton officials found four “egregious” notifications in a separate box, which were erroneously labeled as nonegregious and may have resulted in license suspensions, the report states. Those notifications were, therefore, not prioritized for processing.
Finally, the report found other egregious notifications that were “processed in a manner inconsistent with the remediation plan described by the RMV.”
A spokesman pointed to MassDOT’s third progress report, released on July 12, which outlined that there would “still be work to do for drivers with alcohol-related violations that may not currently affect their licensing eligibility due to the age of the violation and it will be important that these are eventually added to complete licensure records due to Massachusetts life-time look-back law for alcohol-related offenses.”
Grant Thornton, the MassDOT and a legislative oversight committee are each conducting separate investigations into the agency’s failure to keep up with license suspensions, including the case of a trucker accused of killing seven motorcyclists in a crash in New Hampshire on June 21.