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Vol. 35, Number 8—August 2003 Central Violations Bureau Helps Collect Millions Each Year for Crime Victims More than 1,000 times a day, every day, someone gets a ticket for running afoul of the law on federal property—a military base, a national park, a national forest, land supervised by the Bureau of Indian Affairs, or even a U.S. Post Office. "There are 400,000 to 500,000 violations a year. They generate from $16 million to $18 million in revenue," said Ted Willmann, chief of the Central Violations Bureau (CVB), a little-known entity within the federal Judiciary. The officer who issues the ticket writes it up in triplicate, keeping one copy. Another is mailed to the CVB in San Antonio, Texas; a third is given to the violator in the form of an envelope ready for mailing. About two-thirds of those cited for violations opt for forfeiture of collateral—paying without requesting a court date. They mail a check or money order, usually made out to the CVB or a clerk of court, to Atlanta, where the Bank of America serves as a lock-box facility. "The payments are then deposited into the Treasury and get transferred into the Crime Victims Fund maintained by the Justice Department," Willmann said. "None of the money stays in the Judiciary. It is distributed by Congress to battered women's shelters, places for abused children, or victims' advocacy groups." Most fines are in the $25-100 range. At one end of the spectrum is a $7 parking ticket issued in Puerto Rico; at the other a $10,000 citation for killing an endangered species. "Those cited for petty offenses have the option of paying without going to court, but some offenses are serious enough for mandatory court appearances—offenses such as driving under the influence or assault," Willmann said. About 20 percent of all violators are told they must appear in court. "The officers mail the tickets to us, and the first thing we do after opening the mail each day is to scan them into our computer system," Willmann said. "They go into a queue until our data entry staff (about 30 employees) can bring them up on a screen and enter information—name, address, event, the fine amount—onto our system. "Then we schedule each one for court. In our database, we have all the magistrate judges and all the available court dates for the year. Each ticket has an indication of where it was issued. Our computer system knows, based on where the ticket was issued, what the next available court date is for that area, and schedules for that next court date. Four weeks prior to that date, we'll send that defendant a notice to appear. It will say you are scheduled to appear in court on this date, at this location, and at this time." What if an East Coast resident gets cited in a national park somewhere in the West? "The transfer of jurisdiction is possible. The violator would have to call us and begin the process of requesting a transfer. It's up to the magistrate judge to grant such a request," Willmann explained. "In the most serious of cases, a transfer might not get granted." Data entry staffers at the CVB help the courts keep track of tickets that go unpaid, doing so by matching payments with open citations and archiving that information. "We mail that information to magistrate judges across the country two weeks prior to each scheduled court date," Willmann said. "After the hearing, the entered disposition of each case is returned to us, and we enter it onto our system, where it's kept for the required five years." The CVB has been based in San Antonio since 1995, when centers there and in Denver, Colorado were combined. The collection and bookkeeping efforts previously had been handled in eight regional centers.

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