Stevens Asks NH AG To Look Into Delayed Criminal Restitution Payments To Victims

By PAULA TRACY, InDepthNH

CONCORD, NH — Executive Councilor Janet Stevens, R-Rye, says restitution payments to victims of crime are not getting out in a timely manner and she is now asking the Attorney General's Office to take action to get the New Hampshire Department of Corrections Field Services Division to comply with the law.

In a March 4 letter to Attorney General John Formella, Stevens asked the Department of Justice to conduct an immediate review of the DOC’s compliance with statutory restitution obligations; determine whether the failure to disburse collected funds constitutes a violation of victims’ rights under state law; establish a corrective action plan with clear deadlines to ensure that collected restitution is promptly
distributed and evaluate vendor accountability.

She is also asking for transparency with a public timeline for full operational restoration of restitution processing.

"Crime victims should never bear the burden of administrative failures, software deficiencies, or staffing
shortages. If restitution has been collected, it must be paid. If enforcement mechanisms are inadequate, they must be strengthened. If vendor performance is deficient, it must be addressed," Stevens wrote.

Jane Graham, director of communications and external affairs for the NH Department of Corrections, said the department continues to distribute restitution payments and noted that since August, more than 3,800 restitution checks have been issued to victims.

"While payments are ongoing, there has been a processing delay related to a May 2025 software upgrade to the Department’s offender management system, CORIS v8. Since Commissioner William Hart and Assistant Commissioner Jessica Kuron came on board, the Department has actively engaged with our partners at the New Hampshire Department of Justice and the New Hampshire Department of Information Technology, both of whom have been valuable assets in addressing these issues. The Department of Information Technology has deployed a dedicated team that is working directly with us and the vendor to identify problems and implement fixes within the CORIS v8 system," Graham said.

"We have made significant progress, and this work will not stop until these delays are fully resolved.

"Restitution is critically important to victims, and we understand the financial and emotional impact these payments have. We remain fully committed to victims and to ensuring restitution payments are processed as quickly as possible,” Graham said.

Stevens said the DOC manages approximately 13,000 active offender restitution cases, impacting roughly 21,000 victims. She said a key problem to getting payment out is a lack of staff within the DOC to process the payments.

"Presently, the DOC’s Field Services Division is operating with only four collections officers — a significant reduction in personnel from when the Division was fully staffed with eleven professionals nearly a decade ago," she wrote.

"These staff fulfill a vital responsibility to oversee restitution accounts, collect payments from offenders, and disburse funds to victims.

"However, reports indicate that nearly 60 percent of offenders — approximately 8,000 individuals — have not made a restitution payment in 60 days or more. Even more troubling, of the estimated $2 million that the Division collected in 2025 on behalf of victims, $1 million of those funds have still not been dispersed to victims as of January 2026," Stevens said.

Stevens said the current staffing level is simply not sufficient to manage the high volume of cases and has placed a strain on the Division’s capacity to effectively collect restitution and ensure consistent and timely disbursements to victims.

"Victims who are legally entitled to these funds are experiencing prolonged and unjustifiable delays and without being notified or provided any explanation of these delays," Stevens said.

The New Hampshire Legislature established restitution as part of the rehabilitation process. The impetus for such a law was multi-pronged providing the opportunity for offenders to pay their debt to society and to the victim, and easing the burden of victims.

"Victims of crimes are left with significant expenses as a result of the crime committed against them and they rely on restitution funds to pay medical bills, counseling expenses, make up for lost wages from missed work, transportation costs to court appearances, damaged or stolen property, compromised bank accounts, funeral expenses, and more," Stevens wrote to Formella. "Any disruption to disbursing these funds is a failure of the state to meet its statutory obligation to victims of crime," under RSA 21-M:8-k, NH’s Crime Victims' Bill of Rights.

After three years of implementation delays, Stevens said, failed data integration, and repeated contract amendments — and after investing $8.7 million in taxpayer funds into a new Offender Management System — the Department’s CORIS platform - still cannot reliably perform its most basic statutory function: processing restitution payments to victims.

The Executive Council approved that contract and another one associated with the efforts. She said the department has attributed much of the breakdown to the CORIS Offender Management System implemented under a $6.5 million contract with Abilis Solutions LLC. It was recently acquired by N. Harris Computer Corporation.

The OMS is the DOC’s primary source of electronic record keeping and data files including but not limited to sentencing detainers, disciplinary/conduct, supervision notes, program completion and other areas of daily operational management of the residents who are under the custody and jurisdiction of the department, she said.

Originally, the anticipated “Go Live” date was January 2025, more than a year ago. In February 2025, the NH DOC requested a "no cost" extension amendment to the original contract, extending the completion date to June 30, 2025.

"A few months later, it was identified that a failure to properly integrate data from CORIS V4 to CORIS V8 created a disruption in service capabilities. This was not publicly identified until August 2025. At the time, victims awaiting restitution disbursements reported being told no checks would be issued until September, after months of delay without explanation. Unfortunately, this issue remains ongoing. In January 2026 it was reported that some payments were being disbursed on a limited basis until the remaining technical issues were addressed," Stevens wrote.

Although a $2.2 million maintenance contract from May 2023 remains in place, the system reportedly cannot properly process payments in certain victim categories - “incarcerated” and “offenders who are responsible to multiple victims” - and continues to experience operational failures, she wrote.?

These challenges are not only impacting restitution payments, but other DOC programs as well. In November 2025, as part of a performance audit update, it was reported that the delayed rollout of CORIS V8 has also prevented the DOC from creating and implementing a mechanism to track benchmarks, progress, and recidivism of the Sex Offender Treatment program.

"It was not possible to track metrics to determine whether the program was effective under the previous version of CORIS (V4), and it was suggested that the OMS would not be stable enough to run new reports and start tracking these metrics for another 6 months."

House Bill 1576 https://gc.nh.gov/bill_status/billinfo.aspx?id=2423&inflect=2" which seeks to improve the law that Stevens said has not been meaningfully updated in nearly 30 years, has been sent to interim study on a voice vote of the House on March 7. The bill would establish new mechanisms for enforcing offenders’ criminal restitution obligations and establish clear guardrails for victim notification, ensuring rights are upheld.

"While this legislation is a critical step to improve the restitution process for long-term accountability and success, existing law already requires the enforcement and distribution of restitution. The Department of Corrections has failed to meet their obligations to victims for almost a year. There is an immediate need to address the ongoing disruptions to the offender management system and resolve these issues expeditiously," Stevens wrote.

New Hampshire law requires that a 17 percent administrative fee is collected in addition to the victim’s total restitution (15 percent towards the DOC for collections and 2 percent to the NH Victim’s Assistance Fund).

This means that 83 percent of every payment submitted by the offender is deposited directly to a crime victim’s account.

She said In FY25, $258,280 was generated for the DOC’s collections efforts and was used to pay part-time staff to assist with collecting and processing restitution payments.

To implement HB1576, the DOC states it would need to hire three new case managers, as well as one
accountant ($328,000 in FY28 and $344,000 in FY29).

Additionally, several provisions in the bill related to automatic deduction of restitution from inmate accounts, enforcement authority, and victim notification requirements are not currently supported by the OMS software, requiring system modifications. Outside programming and vendor support will be needed to make these updates operational, Stevens said.

This article first appeared on InDepthNH.org and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.