Full Report (PDF) - Office of the Legislative Auditor

44 MOTOR VEmCLE DEPUTY REGISTRARSSome private deputies have income sources other than their salary. For example,some private deputy registrars own the building that contains the deputy registrarbusiness and include the rent paid by the deputy registrar corporation to the owneras a business expense. Similarly, some private deputy registrars lease a car to thecorporation and include the lease amount as an expense. We did not include anyincome (or losses) that deputies may make from renting space or leasing cars tothe deputy registrar corporation.To interpret deputy registrar incomes, it is important to consider the number ofowners who work for the deputy and whether they work full time. In the typicalprivate deputy registrar, there is one owner who works full time. Some privatedeputies are owned by two people who both work for the deputy, either full timeor part time. In other cases, there is one owner who works part time and relies onstaff to operate the business. The average number of full-time owners per deputyis about 1.0 for each size category in our sample.EXPENSES AND REVENUES OF PUBLICDEPUTY REGISTRARSMinnesota has 90 public deputy registrars, including four operated by HennepinCounty (downtown Minneapolis, Southdale, Ridgedale, and Brookdale), four operatedby Anoka County (Columbia Heights, Anoka, Blaine, and St. Francis), andthree operated by Washington County (Stillwater, Woodbury, and Forest Lake). In·our financial analysis, we treated the deputies operated by Hennepin, Anoka, andWashington counties as a separate multiple-office category.Expenses of Public Deputy RegistrarsTable 3.1 and Figure 3.1 show how the cost per transaction varies with size amongpublic deputy registrars. We found:• In 1992, the cost per transaction varied greatly among public deputies,ranging from S2.10 to $6.01.• Larger deputy registrars tended to have lower costs per transactionthan smaller deputy registrars, but there is considerable variationwithin size categories.Among single-office deputy registrars, large deputies had an average cost of $2.76per transaction, compared with $2.94 for medium-l~e deputies, $3.53 for medium-smalldeputies, and $4.15 for small deputies. 5Among deputies that process fewer than 24,000 transactions per year, 38 percent(8 out of 21 that we examined) had an average cost exceeding $4 per transaction.The only other deputies in our sample with a cost of more than $4 per transaction5 These differences are statistically significant at the a. = .01 level.