PW Municipalities Grapple To Find Out Who Paid Driving Fines

PW municipalities grapple to find out who paid driving fines
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PW municipalities grapple to find out who paid driving fines
By: Dan Roem
Gainesville Times
03/28/2007

There is no easy way for Prince William municipalities to find out who has paid their traffic fines and who has not.

For traffic tickets issued by the Town of Haymarket's police, the town government has to track down the offenders in question to find out if they've paid their monetary dues.

If the Haymarket town clerk, Jennifer Preli, wants to find out if John Doe paid his speeding ticket issued last December, she has to call in the case number to the Prince William County court clerk and ask.

It's not a big problem, Preli said, but it does raise auditing issues.

"We called the county before" about finding out if there was a way to streamline the data of who paid and who did not, Preli said. "We were told, 'There's no way'."

When motorists are fined for speeding through Haymarket, they write checks to Prince William County.

Once a month, the county's Circuit Court sends a check to Haymarket to cover the fines it received from those offenders who paid and for interest on the fines if they were paid late.

The only problem is the court does not inform Haymarket or any other municipality of who has paid their fines and who has not. Instead, each of the municipalities just receive one lump check each month.

When it comes time for Haymarket's annual audit, this can create a headache for the government and auditors alike.

According to Tawny Hays, clerk of the General District Court, which handles the traffic cases before the collected money is shifted to the Circuit Court, Prince William handles more than 180,000 traffic cases per year.

Thus, there would be an "astronomical" amount of information the county would have to send back to municipalities in order to let them know who has paid their fines, she said.

"There's not an easy way for us to ... pick up information for every locality," Hays added.

Essentially, municipalities within Prince William just...

PW municipalities grapple to find out who paid driving fines
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