Published on Washington Examiner (http://washingtonexaminer.

com) By: Erica Redmond March 22, 2011 Special to the Washington Examiner

D.C. hunting down $1b owed in overdue fines

The District is getting serious about collecting the estimated $1 billion owed from various tickets and violations from the past few decades, and officials are willing to reach into Maryland and Virginia to get it. A D.C. Council committee is working on debt collection legislation -- the Delinquent Debt Recovery Act -- that would give the District the authority to hire third-party debt collectors to track down those who owe the city and live in other jurisdictions and make them pay up. "The company could put a lien on property, or garnish income," Chairwoman Mary Cheh told The Washington Examiner. "I'm not dictating that they do that, but I want to give the District the authority to do that." Jurisdictions in California and Arizona employ similar debt collection schemes, Cheh said. "It pays for itself," Cheh said. "The third-party collectors add their fee to the amount that's owed. The city wouldn't pay anything up front, and it gives the company the incentive to collect more debts." City officials said D.C. is owed $300 million just in unpaid parking fines from the past seven years. Additional hundreds of millions of dollars are being sought from building code, health department and many other violations, as well as parking tickets dating back decades that are still on city books. Officials said those tickets can still be collected. A spokesman for Cheh said that 75 percent of parking tickets written in D.C. are paid each year, but he didn't have payment rates on fines from other agencies. According to Joe Shapiro, spokesman for the Maryland comptroller, there are no laws that would forbid the District from enforcing unpaid debt on Maryland residents, other than consumer protection laws that cover every debt collector.

Cheh, who chairs the council's Committee on Government Operations and the Environment, will be meeting with officials in the city administrator's office, the attorney general's office and the mayor's budget office to develop a system to better recover the money owed to the District. In addition to hiring third-party collectors, the Delinquent Debt Recovery Act would create a central collections unit. Currently, every agency is in charge of collecting its own fines, but, according to Cheh, "that doesn't work so well." The committee will be studying other states' jurisdictions and tools to make the District central collection unit successful, legally defensible and operationally sound. Anthony Fugett, director of the Maryland Central Collection Unit, is going to be working with the committee on structuring the D.C. unit. The Maryland unit has had a high success rate, and Cheh said she was looking forward to working with Fugett. "We do have multiple people [with tickets] in other states, and, in the nearby states, we could all work together. I assume they have a similar difficulty with us," Cheh said. A central collection agency for the city would give it the ability to intercept people's tax returns or other funds if they have an outstanding fine, Cheh said. Cheh hopes the bill will be ready for consideration by the full council in the fall.
Just last year Amounts of uncollected fines from some D.C. agencies in fiscal 2010: Department of Public Works -- $3,882,283 Department of Consumer and Regulatory Affairs -$2,124,856 District Department of Transportation -- $537,547 District Department of the Environment -- $113,000 Department of Health -- $88,110

Source: D.C. Council

Examiner Staff Writer Freeman Klopott contributed to this report.

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