“Dear PoPville,
Here’s an update from my ongoing battle with the DMV bureaucracy. There are some real issues here having to do with good government, transparency and due process.”
Dear Councilmember Allen,
Thank you again for your attention to my ongoing issue with the DMV. I hope you and your colleagues will continue to pursue a legislative fix to end the DMV’s abuse of its authority. It’s unconscionable that individuals have no recourse, due to the DMV’s lack of transparency and due process, to challenge the validity of alleged outstanding, decade-old parking tickets. I wanted to let you know the latest on my situation to inform your efforts to provide better oversight and improve the DMV’s processes going forward.
After DMV Director Babers was unhelpful in response to your outreach on my behalf, I pursued the only other avenue I had left. I followed up with my bank again to further pursue the possibility of accessing my old records in hopes of finding the proof of my payment to the DMV for the parking tickets 10 years ago. The bank again informed me that they do not keep such records beyond 7 years. I was told by the branch manager at my bank that 7 years is the industry standard for preserving such records, as prescribed by government regulation. Thus, there is absolutely no way for me, or others caught in this DMV catch-22 trap, to provide proof of payment to the DMV without locating my original receipt.
As I’ve previously discussed with you and your staff, it is onerous and unreasonable to expect someone to be able to provide a receipt from 10 years ago. It’s even more unreasonable in a circumstance such as mine, where I had every reason to believe that the matter of the old parking tickets was resolved for good, given my initial registration of the vehicle the tickets were issued to (the Ford Ranger) when I moved from Virginia to DC, followed by repeated successful vehicle registrations over the past 10 years.
Again, I find Director Babers’ explanation that the DMV had no way of knowing that there were outstanding tickets on my vehicle when I registered it in the District to be disingenuous. Since I had to provide my VA license, former address, and vehicle information to DC DMV at the time of registration, the tickets on my Ford Ranger were identified and paid at the time of initial registration of the vehicle. Assertions by the Director that the only way the DMV agents would have been able to identify outstanding tickets on my vehicle was if I volunteered the information contradicts the experience of anyone who has registered a vehicle and owed back tickets, impugns the competence of frontline DMV employees, and does not pass the straight-face test.
TEN YEARS. I think it’s important to put this in perspective. In the intervening 10 years, I have moved multiple times and successfully registered two different vehicles in DC. Yet after all these years, I’m suddenly being presumed guilty of owing this debt, without any means of recourse. For crying out loud, people commit criminal felonies in DC for which the statute of limitations is less than 10 years. The IRS doesn’t even require people to keep their tax records for 10 years. As you noted, there is no adjudication process with the DMV after 60 days have passed. Furthermore, I’m not seeking to adjudicate the validity of the original tickets at this point. My issue is that I already paid the tickets. Yet, I’m now suddenly being required to prove my innocence of this alleged debt by providing a 10-year-old receipt. This is an example of inept, oppressive government bureaucracy at its worst. It’s Kafkaesque. (more…)
