Indiana taxpayers need a better watchdog for the BMV

STATEHOUSE – The column below was recently submitted to area news outlets by State Rep. Dan Forestal (D-Indianapolis) as a “letter to the editor:”

In the ongoing efforts of the Indiana Bureau of Motor Vehicles (BMV) to convince the public that it is worthy of our confidence, the agency’s worst enemy is itself.

Consider the following:

In August 2013, BMV officials admitted the agency has been overcharging many drivers for their operators’ licenses since 2007. For their trouble, these drivers received small refunds.

A month later, the BMV admitted it had been overcharging a number of other fees, including such areas as vehicle registrations, motorcycle endorsements, and personalized license plate fees.

A year after that, the BMV admitted that it had misclassified around 180,000 vehicles since 2004, a mistake that caused nearly $30 million in overcharges.

Nope, nothing to see here.

Perhaps this is why some of us in the Indiana General Assembly see the need for tougher auditing standards for this agency. After all, they don’t seem to be doing a very good job policing themselves. Just over the past year, we have seen a series of mistakes that have led to millions of dollars in overcharges to motorists. Then we watched as the BMV sent letters, politely asking people who were mistakenly given refunds to not cash their checks or to return them.

Faced with a rising furor, even Gov. Mike Pence thought that enough was enough. In September, he authorized the BMV to hire an independent consulting firm to audit the agency’s financial structure.

Ordinarily, that might be enough to make a person think that something was being done…at long last.

Well, except for the fact that the BMV didn’t get around to signing the contract for the independent audit with BKD Partners until the first part of December, almost three months after the governor asked the agency to do something. I’ve been wading through this contract to find out the scope of the work, but so far, the only thing I’ve found out for sure is that it could cost the taxpayers of Indiana somewhere in the vicinity of $100,000 to find out what the heck is going on at the BMV.

For the BMV, this contract is supposed to provide cover. When we wonder what’s going on, they can point to the audit and try to make you think that all your worries should be settled…sometime in the near future, because they can’t comment on audits that that are ongoing.

They may blather, but they cannot hide.

This is why I will pursue legislation that demands independent audits of the BMV every couple of years.

Again, the BMV doesn’t think this is necessary, since the State Board of Accounts supposedly audits the agency every year.

Except, well, some of these overcharges were kept hidden by BMV officials and probably were missed by the State Board of Accounts.

And how can this be? There have been a lot of staff cuts at the State Board of Accounts in recent years, as that agency tries to deal with the constant demand by the Pence Administration to revert potential operating funds back to the state to maintain a $2 billion budget surplus. There have been rumblings that the governor has agreed to provide more funding for more examiners, but we’ve seen that the allure of that $2 billion surplus tends to make this administration think that a little thing like adequate staffing is a secondary consideration.

More disconcerting is the admission that top-level BMV officials chose not to tell anyone about the overcharges in an apparent effort to hide the agency’s budget problems. Couple this with their attempts to conceal public documents and their ongoing efforts to keep information from the public’s view, and I think that public trust is something that should not be granted until they have proven that they deserve it.

And that’s why I think we need to have better watchdogs for the BMV.

For now at least, they simply cannot be trusted.