Frontline knew ‘very little’ of how fines system worked

Frontline gardaí know “very little” about how the system for issuing fines works and had no formal training in the area for 12 years, the O’Sullivan report found.

That is despite the number of offences attracting fines, known as fixed charge notices (FCN), rocketing to 614 — a huge number compared to other policing jurisdictions.

Gardaí have also been using an IT system which was fundamentally flawed, with coding errors that failed to signal when FCNs were improperly processed.

The failures resulted in almost 14,700 motorists being summoned before the courts, fined and given penalty points for offences without having the chance to deal with the issue by way of paying an FCN.

It also led to motorists being summoned before the courts despite having paid an FCN while some motorists were issued with more than one summons for the same offence. Others who did receive an FCN but did not pay escaped prosecution altogether.

IT failures were not to blame for this last category — the report says instead this was down to “procedural and communication failures”. However while the IT problems were solved by July 2016, the report says the procedural and communication failures are “an ongoing problem”.

An examination of the system was ordered after a judge in Co Leitrim asked for an explanation as to why a woman was being prosecuted in his court for driving without an NCT certificate when she had paid an FCN. People can only be summoned to court if they fail to pay.

Assistant Commissioner Michael O’Sullivan found a number of different mistakes were being made, most involving people prosecuted in the courts without ever receiving an FCN in the first place.

He placed the bulk of the blame on the IT system which he said had been expanded on a piecemeal basis between 2002 and 2016.

In all that time, despite numerous reviews due to various scandals, nobody detected a coding glitch, corrected since last year, which allowed the issuing of summons for offences that first required an FCN.

The number of offences this flawed system dealt with jumped from 390 in 2009 to 614 in 2016 yet many were rarely or never used.

Of 1.3m FCNs issued between January 2014 and August, 132 offences never appeared and 442 were used less than 100 times. Mr O’Sullivan recommended underutilised offences be removed from the system.

While all these extra offences were being added, frontline gardaí were being updated by way of bulletins often 100 pages long, “extremely technical and difficult to read”. He recommended that simple how to guides be issued, no more than three pages long.

The system was also accessed by 30 “stakeholders”, including gardaí, traffic wardens, private speed van operators, the private FCN printing and posting company, the Road Safety Authority, Department of Transport, Courts Service and many garda technical and management units. He recommended the entire system be replaced and the number of those with access to it reduced.

Between 2004 and 2016, gardaí got no training on the system, apart from “word of mouth from other gardaí”.

It was recommended this be an integral part of continuing professional development courses.

Mr O’Sullivan also said consideration should be given to allowing gardaí full discretion at the roadside as to how to proceed with an offence. This would require a simple legislative change from where it says a garda “shall” issue an FCN to a Garda “may” do so.

In cases where it was still possible to withdraw a court summons where an FCN was paid, this was underway since last year. Where a court had already applied a penalty, the cases were being individually appealed and overturned.

Mr O’Sullivan said he found no evidence the mistakes were deliberate. “There is nothing to suggest that there was any deliberate action taken to circumvent the system or gain any personal benefit.”