OCTOBER 5, 2019 5
METRO
the New Hampshire tragedy.
The audit found that Registry
officials failed to exercise basic
oversight and were so con-
sumed with improving custom-
er service operations that they
pushed aside or outright ne-
glected the behind-the-scenes
work intended to keep unsafe
drivers off the road.
“Massachusetts had a long-
standing policy of not prioritiz-
ing the processing of out-of-
state notifications,” said the
106-page audit. “This policy
spans multiple administrations
of the state government’s execu-
tive branch.”
This failure had tragic con-
sequences when the Registry
failed to act on alerts it received
in late May about Volodymyr
Zhukovskyy, who had refused
to take a chemical sobriety test
in Connecticut. The paper and
electronic notifications from
Connecticut should have result-
ed in Massachusetts suspend-
ing Zhukovskyy’s license, which
would have made him ineligible
to work as a truck driver at the
time he was on a delivery in
New Hampshire in June and al-
legedly caused the deaths of
seven people on motorcycles.
Zhukovskyy has pleaded not
guilty and is awaiting trial.
The crash, and subsequent
revelations about the Registry’s
failings, prompted fallout at the
state agency. Registrar Erin De-
veney stepped down and Thom-
as Bowes, another RMV official,
was fired.
A preliminary report re-
vealed that an RMV employee
saw an electronic alert suggest-
ing Zhukovskyy’s commercial
license should be suspended.
The employee spied the alert
for just a few seconds, but took
no action because he had never
been trained to.
That lapse was one of many
cited in the report. Auditors
generally found miscommuni-
cation, a lack of knowledge, lax
uRMV
Continued from Page 1
oversight, and unease with the
technology also contributed to
the Registry’s wholesale woes.
In a letter released with the
audit, acting Registrar Jamey
Tesler said he agrees with audi-
tors’ prescription for changing
the culture within the agency.
“I will also continue to em-
phasize with all of the RMV’s
employees what has been my
priority since arriving here —
that all employee functions are
essential to the RMV’s overall
mission and responsibility to
our customers and the safety of
the roadways,” Tesler wrote.
Tesler noted that other
states also struggle to keep driv-
er records current and notify
counterparts about traffic viola-
tions.
On Friday, for example, the
Registry said it received about
22,000 paper notifications from
Rhode Island about Massachu-
setts drivers who have been
convicted of traffic offenses
there since 2017. Rhode Island
officials had already entered
the information into a national
database, a spokesman for that
state’s Division of Motor Vehi-
cles said.
More than 6,300 Massachu-
setts drivers’ licenses have been
suspended as part of the inter-
nal review of what went wrong.
The Legislature’s Joint Com-
mittee on Transportation is
pressing ahead with an investi-
gation into whether officials
outside of the Registry were
aware of safety lapses within
the agency.
“Today’s report certainly
makes clear that no single per-
son within the Registry caused
the widespread and systemic
problems in the public safety
operations of the Registry,” said
a joint statement from state
Representative William M.
Straus and state Senator Joseph
A. Boncore, who lead the com-
mittee.
A spokeswoman for Gover-
nor Charlie Baker said Baker
“appreciates the work that wentinto” the audit.
“As highlighted in this re-
port, the Registry has already
made significant progress over
the past few months to address
structural and organizational
issues at the RMV, and the ad-
ministration expects this work
to continue to keep our drivers
and roads safe,” spokeswoman
Lizzy Guyton said.
The audit goes back as far as
1999 to shed light on the ori-
gins of the Registry’s lackadaisi-
cal approach to processing no-
tices.
Auditors cited an undated
memo written by a Registry
lawyer during the tenure of
Daniel Grabauskas, who led the
agency from 1999 to 2002. The
memo warned of the “great
risk” Massachusetts faced be-
cause it refused to participate
in a voluntary national pact
that set information-sharing
standards between state motor
vehicle divisions. Massachu-
setts is one of only four states
not signed onto the agreement
known as the Driver License
Compact, the audit said.
The decades-old memo not-
ed that the decision not to join
the compact gave Massachu-
setts a bad name among other
state motor vehicle agencies
and that states “with lesser re-
sources and technology have
joined.”
The current leadership of
the Massachusetts Department
of Transportation told auditors
that it was unaware of the exis-
tence of the memo prior to the
Zhukovskyy crash. The former
registrar, Deveney, confirmed
she knew the Registry was not
part of the national compact,
the audit said.
Auditors determined the
Registry stopped systematically
processing alerts about local
drivers who broke traffic laws
in other states in 2013 and later
passed over opportunities to
tackle accumulating backlogs.
In 2016, the job of process-
ing the alerts was transferred tothe Merit Rating Board, a Reg-
istry division. Bowes, then the
leader of the Merit Rating
Board, wanted to find a way to
process the alerts in a way that
wouldn’t result in license sus-
pensions for the oldest infrac-
tions, the audit said.
A contractor provided the
Registry with a proposal for
carrying out Bowes’s plan on
Jan. 6, 2017, the audit said, but
never got approval for proceed-
ing with the project.
More than two years later,
March 19, 2019, Bowes drafted
an e-mail to Deveney in which
he estimated he would need
five full-time workers to process
out-of-state notifications that
had piled up.
Auditors, however, believe
the e-mail was never transmit-
ted to Deveney, the audit said.
After the crash in New
Hampshire, the RMV discov-
ered 72 boxes, 53 mail bins, and
five banker boxes brimming
with unprocessed paper notifi-
cations from other states.
The audit raises concerns
about other areas where Regis-
try workers have fallen behind.
As of Monday, there were
more than 13,000 items in a
queue of criminal data informa-
tion, the audit said. The data
awaiting review could result in
driver’s license suspensions, the
audit said.
There’s also a backlog in pro-
cessing violations related to ig-
nition interlock devices, which
administer alcohol breath tests
to drivers before they can start
their vehicle, the audit said.
Tesler said the Registry has
workers on overtime to help
catch up on that backlog, say-
ing there are about 1,275 items
in the queue and about 350 are
being completed weekly.Martin Finucane of the Globe
staff contributed to this report.
Laura Crimaldi can be reached
at [email protected].
Follow her on Twitter
@lauracrimaldi.RMV’s failures longstanding, audit says
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