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.
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.
