Friday July 25, 2008
Just in case you thought that things are all better in the state Department of Motor Vehicles following the arrival of Bob Ward, former House minority leader, as the new commissioner, Blog-o-rama has received a report to the contrary.
Yes, it’s the state auditors’ new 62-page study of the DMV for the fiscal years 2005 and 2006, where the sublime and the ridiculous are nestled together like the lion and the lamb.
Yes, there’s the nearly obligatory finding that DMV employees are using agency computers for downloading “inappropriate material from the Internet” on state time.
But there’s also the more worrisome finding that the DMV isn’t keeping very good track of folks driving around with uninsured vehicles, or penalizing them.“Lapses of up to 14 days were not being pursued by the Department,” the auditors found. “Registrants were permitted to avoid the penalties by turning in license plates, despite the lack of a corresponding statutory provision.”
In layman’s terms, that means DMV employees are MAKING UP THE LAW.
Bob Jaekle of Stratford, one of the two state auditors, just told the Blogster that the 28 recommendations amount to a lot.“It shows that Bob still has some work cut out for him at the department,” Jaekle said, adding that he couldn’t find out on a summer Friday what the downloading issues were, recalling last year’sDEP audit that found one agency worker downloaded russianwives.commore than 2,000 times.
Jaekle said that on the insurance issue, the DMV is on the verge of enacting an Internet-based information exchange with companies that write commercial-vehicle policies.“They hope that will be up and running soon,” Jaekle said.
Bill Seymour, spokesman for the DMV, offered some boiler plate response a few minutes ago.“Overall we welcome their comments,” Seymour said. “We are going to take all the recommendations they made, give them to our bureau chiefs who are members of the commissioner’s executive team and have them review the recommendations and find the best way to implement the recommendations.”