Freeborn County is expected to pay $70,000 in additional wage costs this year because of inefficiencies caused by MNLARS, the state’s licensing and registration system unveiled in July 2017.

Freeborn County Administrator Thomas Jensen said earlier this month the county is spending approximately $6,000 per month in overtime costs as local staff conduct more work the state used to do.

“It effectively is going to cost Freeborn County approximately $70,000 additional costs in wages to provide the exact same service we were providing before MNLARS started,” he said. 

Jensen, who expects increased costs to be funded by county reserves, said the previous system allowed workers to log into a system and renew tabs, while the new system is more inefficient.

“Instead of taking two minutes, it’s taking 20 because they have to do so many additional steps and workarounds to get to the final product,” he said.

Jensen said counties are frustrated at program inefficiencies and questioned the timing of the rollout.

“I simply just question how they deployed the program when it wasn’t ready, it doesn’t work, and the amount of inconvenience and cost it’s putting on everybody in the state — I don’t know why they did it,” he said. “Somebody erred.”

Freeborn County License Center supervisor Susan Wagner said the program is not working as well as the state promised.

“It’s not the way the state originally presented it,” she said.

Wagner said the License Center staff only waited on 16 people the first day the program was introduced — July 24, 2017 — far fewer than the minimum 100 to 120 people they typically help.

She said the state initially blamed local license offices before taking responsibility.

“Customers come in, and we just can’t help,” she said. “All we can do is give them permits.”

Wagner said processes to purchase personalized license plates and collector plates became difficult after the program was unveiled.

Wagner said she was informed at a recent annual meeting that the state plans to take action to fix issues experienced by the program.

“They are addressing some of the bigger issues that are frustrating the citizens,” she said.

She said though the adjustments will likely not make the system as efficient as it was before MNLARS, it will bring efficiencies to the system.

Wagner said the system sometimes becomes overloaded and locks up when customers are being served. She said the state informed her repairing the system could take up to one week and told her on at least one occasion a 60-day free permit and have them come back to renew tabs.

“Customers don’t want to hear that they have to come back,” she said.

Wagner said mailing addresses have sometimes not worked.

Local deputy registrars are now responsible for issuing the cab cards during transfers.

“It’s just very time-consuming,” she said. “I’ll gladly do it for the customers because they need it, but it’s just frustrating that there’s not a little button that after we enter everything for the transfer, why can’t we just hit a little button for the cab card?”

Wagner said the state assumed MNLARS would be more successfully rolled out then it was.

“I don’t think they realized how bad it was going to be when they rolled it out,” she said. “I think they thought they were hoping it would work better than it did. There are a lot of things that have improved. I mean, we are functioning, but there are still so many things that aren’t working the way it should be.”

Wagner said the county has been told it would be charged for every license plate it cannot account for.

“At the end of the night, it changed numbers on us,” she said. “It had a different number in the system.

“I was spending hours just double-checking what sticker did we really give to what plate.”

Wagner said there were 10,000 orphan documents statewide within one month of when the program was introduced because numbers did not match what was listed in reports.

Every day, License Center staff review each number to ensure numbers match reports.

“There’s just so many things that we’re having to redo and re-check and re-verify and just create our own records to verify.”

Wagner estimated she spends one to three hours working at home each night because of inefficiencies posed by the system and informed the state before MNLARS began that it was not ready to be unveiled.

She said she holds the people who wrote the program responsible for its shortcomings.

“Whoever said, ‘yes, it’s ready to roll out’ had to know it wasn’t ready to roll out,” she said. “They had to know that it wasn’t working properly, or they didn’t test it.”

Wagner said the state is under pressure to solve program shortcomings.

“There’s been a lot of revamping up there and different people working on,” she said. “I know they’ve been under pressure from Legislature and everything, and I’m glad it stays in the news, because I think it keeps the pressure on them to keep working and trying to fix it.

“I feel bad for all of the money that has been spent, and more money to try to fix it.”

District 27A Rep. Peggy Bennett, R-Albert Lea, said “Minnesotans deserve a system that works, and so do our registrars … it’s unacceptable.”

“It’s been 10 years, $100 million has been spent on it, and it still does not work,” she said. “It’s unacceptable.

“It really makes me angry.”

Minnesota legislators unsuccessfully tried to pass a bill last year to reimburse license centers for their overtime work associated with MNLARS.

Bennett said a Geneva man told her he has driven from Geneva to Albert Lea four times because of system inefficiencies.

“We have to get this fixed,” she said.

Bennett said she “absolutely” thinks MNLARS will be addressed during next year’s legislative session, adding people need to be held financially accountable.

She said the program was likely not ready to be unveiled.

“We appreciate the Legislative Auditor’s work to understand the accuracy of transactions that occurred in the MNLARS system during its first six months of operation and illuminate the complexity behind motor vehicle service delivery in the state of Minnesota,” said a join statement from Minnesota IT Services and the Minnesota Department of Public Safety. “The report found that, for several types of transaction, over 99 percent are being processed accurately by MNLARS. Where the report found transaction inaccuracies attributable to system defects, it also notes system improvements that have already been made to address them. Where system gaps remain, we are committed to making enhancements to MNLARS accordingly.

“But let’s be clear: the vast majority of inaccuracies asserted in this report are not the result of a malfunctioning MNLARS IT system. Rather, they largely reflect differences in interpretation of statute, human error in data entry and the misalignment between unique Minnesota laws and automotive industry practices. We at Minnesota IT Services and the Department of Public Safety stand ready to work with the Minnesota Legislature to clarify and manage the complexities that underlie motor vehicle laws and industry practices in Minnesota.”

Wagner said managers and employees in license centers in other counties have had stress-induced health problems caused by issues in the MNLARS system.

“They have had heart attacks, strokes, a lot of bleeding ulcers from the stress level from dealing with this,” she said. “There have been — we have not here — but there have been some offices that have been threatened, that they have had law enforcement come in because customers are so mad, citizens are so mad, because we’re the people the face that they get to see.

“I don’t condone them threatening people, but I understand people’s frustration.”

Jensen said he hopes the Legislature can fix the problem. He expects one full-time to be hired in the DMV office for 2019.

“Where are they going to get the money?” he said. “They gotta get it out of their tax roll, too. So it goes back to, does the state pay? Does the county pay? At the end of the day, we’re talking taxpayer money to fix a problem that was created just because it was deployed too early and didn’t go through the proper testing.”

According to the Minneapolis Star Tribune, the Senate appropriated nearly $10 million in May to last through July, so Gov. Mark Dayton’s administration could avoid pending layoffs of technical staff and cover other costs of fixing the system.

The state has already spent more than $100 million on the system.

District 27 Sen. Dan Sparks, DFL-Austin, did not respond to a request for comment.