State court officials expect a report in March to show whether all the computer programming errors that misdirected more than $27 million in court fines over a five year period have been corrected. For example, the errors meant $10 million in traffic fines that should have gone to the Iowa DOT went to other state and local government programs.
During testimony Monday before a legislative committee, State Court Administrator Bob Gast said an outside vendor is reviewing the programming fixes.
“Those changes have already been made and put into effect in November,” Gast said, “but we are here to say since we made the changes and we made the mistake the first time, we want someone from the outside to verify that it is working how we intend it to be.”
The errors happened after the legislature made changes on how court fines were to be distributed. Gast says court officials are planning a review of the entire I.T. case management system for the Iowa Judicial Branch, to try to avoid future problems.
(By Katarina Sostaric, Iowa Public Radio)