Billing and collection
procedures not understood by staff is resulting in lost revenue for the Yolo
County Collection Services, the Grand Jury has determined.
The Grand Jury released a
report on the system Friday, calling it “broken.” The Grand Jury had
investigated the agency — which is responsible for collecting fees from the
court system as well as other county departments — after a person said the
methods of billing and collecting were confusing.
After the Grand Jury
investigated, it found underlying problems and expanded the scope of its
investigation, ultimately determining that in fiscal year 2013-14 alone, when
Collection Services billed probationers $946,000 it got back only $209,000, or
around 22 percent.
Collection Services is charged
with collecting probation fees, except victim restitution, which was
transferred to the Superior Court system in 2010, which was about 22 percent of
all the money collected.
The Grand Jury found procedures
are not thoroughly understood by its staff, the Probation Department or
probationers, with monthly statements difficult to understand and “that due to
attrition of experienced staff,” the present workers are less knowledgeable.
The Grand Jury also found a
lack of communication between Collection Services and Probation a large amount
of returned mail along with software programs that are not integrated and
out-of-date manuals to be “significant issues.”
To correct the problems, the
Grand Jury is recommending modification of monthly billing statements to
include initial fees, date, balance carried forward, new charges, adjustments,
payments and current balance due by type of fees. It also wants to see a business
process diagram of the probation fee generation and collection process created,
establishment of protocols for better communication, and the creation and
publication of quarterly reports indicting fees billed, collected, outstanding
balances and any amounts that are delinquent.
Finally, the Grand Jury is
calling for a review to determine the need for additional staff and funding to
process returned mail, and to implement a single accounting and collection
system to allow interdepartmental sharing of required information.
Some of the issues faced that
the Grand Jury dug into include the installation in 2008 of a Windows based
system called Revenue Results, called RevQ. It became fully operational in
2010. The Probation Department was given full access to RevQ to use for daily
information and collection work.
The Grand Jury reported
training was initially available to the Probation Department staff and YCCS
encouraged the Probation Department staff to use RevQ. But “The training and
the use of RevQ was not completely successful due to attrition, staff movement,
and heavy workload,” according to the Grand Jury.
The Probation Department
clerical staff also issue receipts for cash and check payments and turn over
the payments to YCCS weekly or when the total collections exceed $500. YCCS
posts the payments into the RevQ system with credit card payments posted
directly into the system. However, since payment posting can be delayed a week,
there can be uncertainty about how much is owed in real time.
“When there is a problem with RevQ, or someone
does not understand the system, the vendor is called and the County is charged
for the assistance,” the Grand Jury found. “These fees are expensive,
discouraging YCCS staff from calling, and thus the questions are often
unanswered and the problems unresolved.”
As well, the Grand Jury Found
Collection Services and the Probation Department use different accounting and
collection systems which are not fully integrated, changes to probationers’
contact information made by the Probation Department is not routinely shared
with YCCS, and if YCCS makes changes or first time entries into RevQ the
updates are inconsistently shared with the Probation Department.
Finally, the Probation
Department staff is not trained to access the information in RevQ, so when
information is needed in select cases they contact YCCS for help.
The returned mail is an issue,
the Grand Jury found, because around 1,000 billing statements are mailed every
month by the out-of-state vendor. Yet, due to the transient nature of some
probationers, a significant number are returned because of incorrect addresses.
Time permitting, YCCS searches current addresses using the current software.
However, there are still persistent backlogs leading to less revenue collected.
There were people hired to
correct and update the addresses, however, due to staff cuts the problem has
continued.
June 5, 2015
Woodland
Daily Democrat
By
Jim Smith
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