Finally, California DMV to be audited. Here's a brief history of its problems.

OFF THE WIRE
By Luis Gomez

The last straw for the California DMV came Friday when Gov. Jerry Brown finally ordered an audit of the motor vehicle agency to look into its performance issues and how it spends its money.

Brown ordered state Finance Director Keely Martin Bosler to lead the audit of the Department of Motor Vehicles, which is expected to cost $800,000 and yield a final report by March, a spokesman for the Finance Department told the Los Angeles Times.

The agency had survived calls last month for an audit by members of the state Legislature that would have been handled by state Auditor Elaine Howle. At the time, Brown’s aides told lawmakers that it would be too costly and cumbersome.

What finally led the governor to order an audit of the agency in charge of issuing driver’s licenses, identification cards, vehicle registrations and “motor voter” registrations was a new report about problems with “motor voter” after weeks of complaints about wait times, computer crashes and errors.

Here’s a brief history of the DMV problems that resulted in an audit.

Long wait times

The biggest complaint Californians have about the DMV is the long wait times, which had increased up to six hours at some locations, DMV Director Jean Shiomoto had said in August.

Shiomoto attributed the longer-than-usual wait times to the agency’s added task of issuing the new federal Real ID as mandated by a federal law. As a result of public outcry over the wait times, the DMV increased staffing levels and paid workers overtime to offer extended hours.

Not surprisingly, when The San Diego Union-Tribune’s Ideas and Opinion team asked San Diegans on Twitter to vote on the most despised aspect of the DMV, a lot of them said the “wait itself” was the worst.

DMV worker sleeping on the job

A data operator at the DMV had slept on the job for three hours a day for three years from 2014 to 2017, costing the state more than $40,000, a state audit revealed in July. It was focused on many agencies, not specifically the DMV.

The audit also found other instances of misuse of state resources by state workers, but it was the sleeping DMV worker that made headlines over the summer at a time when long DMV waits were causing a public outcry.

Computers crash

A computer glitch caused a statewide outage at nearly 70 out of 172 DMV offices in the state on Thursday, causing delays for hours, the Associated Press reported. The blackout affected processing for driver’s licenses, identification cards and vehicle registrations.

The DMV took to Twitter to apologize to customers after the issue was fixed.

Even still, Californians complained to the DMV, which resulted in reactions like these.

Voter registration errors

Making matters worse, the DMV mishandled the voter registrations of some 23,000 Californians processed through the new “motor voter” system, incorrectly registering them to the wrong party. This was initially reported early this month. Last week, the Los Angeles Times detailed additional problems involving 3,000 license applicants who didn’t want to register to vote but were still signed up.

After noting these mistakes represented a small fraction of the 1.4 million voter registration files processed, Shiomoto blamed an “administrative processing error” and promised to fix it.

Will an audit of the DMV help solve all of these problems once and for all? Share your thoughts and let us know how you would fix the DMV.