IL - New system creating paperwork jams in secretary of state's office Dec. 3, 2000 | 9:53 a.m.

CHICAGO (AP) -- A new system for entering vehicle title and registration data into state computers has created a huge backlog, sometimes delaying identification of vehicles involved in accidents, a newspaper reported Saturday.

Until this year, state clerks split the task of entering data about new vehicle titles and registrations with Illinois prison inmates. But Secretary of State Jesse White's office was forced to take over the entire task after a 1999 law barred the use of prisoners for data entry.

The result has been a massive paperwork backlog, the Chicago Tribune reported.

Police complain they sometimes cannot run routine license plate checks during traffic stops because of the increased time motorists must drive with temporary permits, and sometimes cannot identify vehicles involved in traffic accidents.

Glencoe resident Carol Niec, for example, has been waiting since October for police to identify the owner of a pickup truck that plowed into her car and kept going. Niec, who ended up with whiplash and $3,000 in damage to her Honda Civic, was able to get the license plate number of the truck.

``In my 30 years as a member of the Chicago Police Department, this lack of action on the part of the secretary of state is possibly the most beneficial aid to the criminal element of society that I have observed,'' Chicago Police Sgt. Michael J. O'Brien said in a recent letter to the editor in the Tribune.

About 550,000 applications for vehicle titles -- legal documents that prove car, truck or motorcycle ownership -- and about 240,000 vehicle registrations have not yet been keyed into a computer, the Tribune reported.

The records backlog has doubled the time needed to get a car title -- from an average four to six weeks to about three months -- aggravating car buyers, sellers, insurance companies and financial institutions that rely on titles to do business.

Secretary of state officials say bureaucratic and technical glitches and a high turnover of data-entry clerks complicated efforts to take on the task.

But they said the backlog may be ended by early spring because the agency recently hired two outside data-input firms to help, and a faster, up-to-date computer system is expected to go online by January.

http://www.postnet.com/postnet/news/wires.nsf/StateRegion/F1D16F4856CCE684862569AA0056ECBF?OpenDocument

-- Doris (nocents@bellsouth.net), December 04, 2000