Full Report (PDF) - Office of the Legislative Auditor

CUSTOMER SERVICE37process less than 6,000 transactions per year. At 40 hours per week, these deputieswould process less than 3 transactions per hour. This makes it difficult to justifystaying open 40 hours, much less, longer hours, unless the deputy registrar ispart of a business that nonnally has long hours. For example, one small deputythat is operated by store employees is open 6 days a week because the store isopen those days.Comparisons between public and private deputy registrars show that:On Saturdays,42 percent ofprivatedeputies areopen,compared with17 percent ofpublic deputies.• Private and public deputies are open for about the same number ofhours per week, though private deputies are more likely to be open onSaturdays.Private deputies are open an average of 43.6 hours per week, compared with 43:9hours for public deputies. On Saturdays, 42 percent of private deputies are open,but only 17 percent of public deputies are open. One reason that few public deputyregistrars are open on Saturdays is that they are often located in city hall or thecounty courthouse and can not be open unless the whole building is open. In addition,some public deputies said there is staff resistance to staying open on Saturdays.ERROR RATESAnother measure of customer service is how often a title is suspended because of'an error by the deputy registrar. When customers apply for a new title or a titletransfer, the deputy registrar is responsible for ensuring that there is proper documentationand that the application form is properly completed. The Department ofPublic Safety does not issue a title until it reviews the documents. If the departmentfinds an error, it suspends the title until it obtains proper documentation.The deparbnent also reviews registration renewals if the original registration billwas modified or lost.We collected data on errors made by each deputy registrar during 1992 from theDeparbnent of Public Safety. We used the data to compare error rates betweenlarge and small deputy registrars and between public and private deputy registrars.We did not measure how many errors were made by DPS nor how many errorswere not detected by DPS. But these data should be useful for comparative purposes.Overall, the Department of Public Safety reviewed about 1.46 million long applicationsand about I million registration renewals in 1992. DPS stafffound 24,606errors made by deputy registrars on these applications, an error rate of 1 percent.Since deputies are much more likely to make errors on long applications than tabrenewals, DPS calculates the errors as a percentage oflong applications. Table2.4 lists the frequency of different types of errors. The most common types includeerrors in tax or fee computation or incomplete exemption documentation(16.2 percent), inadequate lien information (14.8 percent), incomplete title appli-