Fairfax County lost out on as much as $3 million last year because police officers wrote traffic tickets in a way that funneled revenue into state — not local — coffers, according to county auditors.
Officers wrote about 15,000 tickets in the first nine and a half months of 2007 that cited a state violation instead of the local version, according to a December report from the Office of Financial and Programs Auditor, released Monday.
“In essence, if a traffic summons written by the police cites a county code violation, the money from the fine belongs to the county,” the report said. “If a state code is cited, the money goes to the state.”
The flawed tickets accounted for about 12 percent of all traffic summons written in that period.
The loss of traffic-ticket revenue, though a sliver of the county’s more than $3.2 billion general fund, could not have come at a worse time for a budget already suffering from the downturn in the housing market.
The police department has moved to correct the problem, which in some cases was the result of a misunderstanding among officers on how to properly fill out traffic summons, said police spokeswoman Mary Ann Jennings. She said officers checked a box marked “county,” when they should also have written in the specific section of county law.
“I’m sure they thought that it would automatically defer to county code, but it didn’t,” she said.
Fairfax County supervisors adopted a clearer ticketing policy Monday in the hopes of preventing the loss of traffic-fine revenue this year, asserting that “whenever a particular citation is identical under both the Code of Virginia and the Code of Fairfax County, the ticket be written pursuant to the county code.”
Fixing the problem could bring in an extra $1 million to $3 million annually, adding to the more than $8 million in fines from the 140,000 traffic summonses issued by Fairfax County police each year, auditors said separately from the report. During the nine-and-a-half-month period last year, police issued about 19,000 state-based citations because there was no corresponding local code.
