Shrewsbury Moves to Address Backlog of Unpaid Fines

The is taking steps to address a backlog of unpaid fines after an audit report ordered by the administration found delays in processing warrants.

Hochschild, Bloom and Company Audit Director Angela Dorn explained the findings of her report on the payment processing operations of the Shrewsbury Municipal Court at a Shrewsbury Board of Aldermen meeting Tuesday night. Dorn said she examined the city’s procedures for payments from fines issued by the court and from tickets given out by Shrewsbury police officers.

According to Dorn, as of Dec. 31, the court’s accounts receivable department had an outstanding balance of about $263,000, of which a little above $200,000 was 120 days old. To find out what might be causing the buildup of overdue fines, Dorn said she randomly selected 60 cases from the judge’s docket and 60 cases from tickets issued in 2010 and then traced them back to their individual files.

“Of those cases, 75 were settled with payments to the city’s bank accounts, 28 cases were still in the normal course of court proceedings and 17 of those cases were pending to go into a warrant status,” she said.

Dorn concluded that the city’s process for moving cases into warrant status is slower than it should be. She recommended the situation could be improved by “putting a little more order in the case files.”

“I think that they need more room to store some of their court cases—there are a lot of cases down there—and to be more aggressive in going to the pending status on these cases.”

Shrewsbury Mayor Felicity Buckley said she had already talked with the Shrewsbury Muncipal Court Division’s administrator about acting on the problem by lending her extra manpower and opening up more space for file storage.

“I went down to look at the room they have down there, and it’s tremendously tight,” she said. “We found a room up here that we are going to clean out…we will move some of the cases from down there, and they will have a better filling system down at the courts.”

In response to a question from the board, Shrewsbury Police Chief Jeff Keller added that storing files digitally by scanning them is a legally tricky task. State law stipulates that physical copies must be held for as long as 50 years for some documents, but he said which ones specifically fall into that category differs with from lawyer to lawyer.