A violation-processing department within the Registry of Motor Vehicles still has about 12,000 work items requiring manual review, some of which may warrant license suspensions, but staff have cleared out every “serious offense” from the backlog, officials said Wednesday.
After a fatal crash and an ensuing scandal this summer revealed a backlog of missed violations at the RMV, staff have been working to issue new suspensions and update work processes to prevent a similar issue in the future.
The Merit Rating Board now has an internal process every day to review the latest digital alerts about driver citations and determine which ones relate to the most egregious cases, according to Interim Director Paolo Franzese.
“We’re up to date on those at the moment,” Franzese told the Merit Rating Board, a three-member panel that is tasked with overseeing the RMV department of the same name. “None of the 12,000 contain serious offenses.”
The number of work items — which does not correspond directly with the number of citations that need attention — was down to 12,300 as of Monday, compared to a high of 21,700 in August, Franzese said. However, a batch of documents arrived from the court system overnight, pushing the total to 13,350 as of Wednesday, a Department of Transportation spokeswoman said after the meeting.
Items in the MRB’s quality control work queue are different than a backlog of tens of thousands of out-of-state paper notifications that built up over years, left in boxes at the RMV’s Quincy headquarters. The queue refers to issues that pop up and prevent citations already entered from processing, such as a typo or inability to read a police officer’s handwriting.