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MSD/Justice Fines Defaulters Tracing Programme

• Annual report
• Technical information
• System description
• Historical activity

Annual Report

Purpose: To enable the Ministry of Justice locate people who have outstanding fines, in order to enforce payment.

Year commenced: 1998

Features: Data transferred up to 13 times a year by CD.

Justice disclosure to MSD: Justice selects fines defaulters for whom it has been unable to find a current address from other sources (including the IR/Justice Fines Defaulters Tracing Programme), and sends the full name, date of birth and Justice unique identifier number to MSD.

MSD disclosure to Justice: For matched records, MSD supplies the last recorded address it holds, along with the unique identifier information originally provided by Justice.

2008/09 activity:

Match runs 5
Records sent for matching 70,941
Possible matches identified            4,890
Notices of adverse action[1] 3,584
Challenges 5
Successful challenges 1
Collection instituted 2,056
Amount paid/remitted[2] $1,363,620       

Commentary: There were significantly fewer records sent for matching during the 2008/09 year than previously (70,941 compared with 353,404 in 2007/08). Justice believes this was because more fine defaulter records were already under other tracing action and therefore not available for matching.

Compliance: Compliant 
 
Technical information
Information matching provision    Social Security Act 1964, s.126A    
Year authorised 1996
Programme type Locating people
Unique identifiers Personal Profile Number

System description

The Ministry of Justice selects a range of its outstanding fines defaulters and sends details of these on CD to MSD. The defaulters eligible for selection include those where Justice does not have a current address, and no current arrangement to pay is in place. Justice sends the full name, date of birth, and Justice unique identifier number to MSD. The information from Justice is matched against beneficiary surname, first and second names, and date of birth information held in MSD files. MSD then sends a return CD to Justice with the last known address of beneficiaries successfully matched. This match is used in locating fines defaulters where no successful collection activity resulted from the similar IR/Justice programme.

Historical activity

  2004/05 2005/06 2006/07 2007/08
Match runs        9 6 14 10
Records sent for matching 287,653 222,961 408,955 372,918
Possible matches identified 26,541 21,839 29,370 17,984
Notices of adverse action 26,694 21,866 29,468 15,785
Challenges 8 1 6 7
Successful challenges 4 1 5 2
Collection instituted 14,163 9,979 13,286 7,562
Amount paid/remitted $13,327,659 $10,151,695 $15,075,423 $10,683,947
% of possible matches for which
collection was instituted		 53% 46% 45% 42%
 

[1] An enhancement to reporting from 1/7/2008 means that Justice now records the actual number of letters sent rather than the number of people eligible to be sent a notice.
[2] This is an ‘in-progress' figure because payments are attributed to this programme for 12 months after the match run date. Final collection figures will be published on our website when they become available.