Over 5,000 licenses pulled in RMV scandal
Independent audit to take more time
More than 5,000 driver’s licenses now have been suspended since the records scandal unfolded at the Registry of Motor Vehicles — and officials say they aren’t done searching for more potentially dangerous drivers who were left on the roads for months and even years.
Transportation Secretary Stephanie Pollack and acting Registrar Jamey Tesler updated the MassDOT board and the Fiscal Management Control Board during a meeting Monday of the 5,260 drivers whose licenses have been suspended to date, 3,391 were found in the backlog of out-of-state notifications of license infractions and 1,869 were found through a state data comparison with the National Driver Registry.
“This is an ongoing and daily effort,” Tesler said. “These numbers will always be changing.”
Pollack noted that the state of New Hampshire recently conducted its own review on how it handles out-of-state notices and sent “several thousand” documents that included more serious offenses.
“We are actively triaging and processing the serious offenses indicated in those documents. Some of them have already been acted on,” Pollack said. “We are collaborating with New Hampshire on improving our communications to each other about driver’s licensing issues. We appreciate the fact that they called for a national solution to automate the state-to-state communication, which we would welcome as well.”
The final report from a third-party audit, conducted by Grant Thornton, was due to be released “by the end of this week,” according to Pollack, but MassDOT gave them an extension by a couple of weeks due to the “voluminous amounts of records and documents they’ve had to review.”
Ongoing internal, external and legislative investigations into the agency’s failure to keep up with license suspensions began as a result of the case of a trucker accused of killing seven motorcyclists in a crash in New Hampshire on June 21.
Monday, in response to a Herald article about an RMV hearing officer’s July 2018 email sounding an alarm about “serious problems” with its computer system, MassDOT sent a copy of that email to the Joint Committee on Transportation. The hearing officer’s email referred to the Lacey Packer law that passed in 1990 after a 10year-old girl, riding on the back of her father’s motorcycle in New Hampshire, was killed in a crash with a driver whose license should’ve been revoked.
The email was one of over a half a million pages of records that MassDOT sent over to the committee since July. That process required state employees to review 300 GB of data and more than 3 million documents, Pollack said.