Fines Costs and Fees Resource Guide

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Resource Guide

In this ICM course, participants will develop an understanding of how to manage a court’s financial resources.

With the courts’ effectiveness in collecting various fines and costs that are assessed against civil litigants and criminal defendants are important for reasons of revenue, the enforcement of such obligations is even more essential to the integrity of the courts. The major collection challenges courts face involve fines and associated surcharges that courts impose at the time of judgment, often resulting in the scrutiny of court performance during election campaigns and budget decisions.

Links to related online resources are listed below. Non-digitized publications may be borrowed from the NCSC Library; call numbers are provided.

Featured Links

Civil Filing Fee Chart

This is a civil filing fee chart which provides basic comparative information on filing fees and was last updated April, 2012. The actual filing fees paid by litigants will likely be substantially higher as this chart does not include "add on" fees, for example service of process charges.

Current Practices in Collecting Fines and Fees in State Courts A Handbook of Collection Issues and Solutions by John Matthias and Laura Klaversma.

Collection of Monetary Penalties Measure Number 7 of the CourTools Trial Court Performance Measures.

Revenue Enhancement: Effectively Collecting Fines and Fees Revenue Enhancement: Effectively Collecting Fines and Fees is an eLearning course offered by the Institute of Court Management. The course is ongoing.

Fines/Fees/Collection Systems Vendors Fines/Fees/Collection Systems Vendors from the Court Technology Vendor List.

Fiscal Services Court Consulting Services helps courts increase information on which to base critical financial decisions and maximize court revenues.

Use of Workflow Automation and Other Technologies to Improve Compliance and Collections Presentation from the Twenty-fifth Anniversary of the National Court Technology Conference that reviews the multitudes of options courts have to improve court-order enforcement and financial compliance.

Justice System Journal Articles

NACM Justice Achievement Awards

A compilation of the National Association for Court Management's Justice Achievement Awards from 2000-2011.

Trends Articles

General

A Caseworker`s Guide to Child Support Enforcement and Military Personnel. (2000). Washington, DC: U.S. Dept. of Health and Human Services, Office of Child Support Enforcement This guide assists child-support-enforcement caseworkers when one of the parents in a case is an active duty member of the armed services. This guide identifies and discusses tools other child-support workers have used successfully to cope with some of the most common difficulties in child-support-enforcement cases involving military personnel.

Lynch, Brian, William Brousseau, and George Cole. Compliance with Judicial Orders: Methods of Collecting and Enforcing Monetary Sanctions. (1991). Washington Project Office.

Monetary sanctions are used as a type of alternative sentence to deal with overcrowding jails and overwhelming caseloads. This monograph discusses the role of sentencing in gaining compliance as well as eight collection techniques in Virginia.

Matthias, John, Gwendolyn Lyford, and Paul Gomez. Current Practices in Collecting Fines and Fees in State Courts. (1995). Court Services Division.

This Handbook of Collection Issues and Solutions is a practical guide to policies and practices for operating and managing a fine-collection system.

Mahoney, Barry, Antoinette Bonacci-Miller, Judith Greene, and Sally Hillsman. Effective Management of Fine Collection and Enforcement in Criminal Cases. (1993). 385 pages.

This report provides curriculum materials for workshops for teams of participants from different jurisdictions, as well as judges, court clerks, and other individual practitioners.

Zallas, Shaun, Terry Brown, John Douglas, Karen Gottlieb, and Willet Willis. Enhancing the Collection of Fines and Fees in Mecklenburg County, North Carolina. (1999). 225 pages, Court Services Division.

This report highlights the success of Mecklenburg County's fine-collection program and emphasizes the aspects of the program that make it a nationally recognized model.

Tobin, Robert. Internal Control of Court-Collected Funds. (1995). 103 pages.

This is a technical monograph designed for the professional court administrator. It addresses the means by which courts protect the integrity of financial processes for collection and disbursement of monies received by the court as fines, forfeitures, fees, costs, escrow funds, user charges, and pass-through funds.

Tobin, Robert. Learning from Recession Experience.. (March 2004).

This document summarizes observations and lessons learned from state experiences in handling the recessions of the early 1990s and early 2000s.

A Framework to Improve How Fines, Fees, Restitution, and Child Support are Assessed and Collected from People Convicted of Crimes. (March 2009). This report describes how fines, fees, and restitution are assessed in criminal courts in Texas, how these court-ordered financial obligations are collected, and how these ssessments and collections account for child support that defendants may already owe. This report reviews the challenges court officials encounter under the current system and recommends strategies to clarify and streamline existing policies.

Clerk`s of Court Generally are Meeting the System`s Collection Performance Standards. (March 2007). This report by the Florida Office of Program Policy Analysis and Government Accountability states, " Statewide, collection rates are generally high and clerks generally meet or exceed performance standards, although civil traffic and juvenile delinquency collections pose difficulties."

Reynolds, Carl Courts Are Not Revenue Centers: 2011-2012 Policy Paper.

This work by the Conference of State Court Administrators is a comprehensive set of standards designed to help ensure that court fees are used to support court related functions and are not just an another form of taxation.

Criminal Debt: Oversight and Actions Needed to Address Deficiencies in Collection Processes. (2001). Washington, DC: General Accounting Office This report discusses factors that have an impact on the effectiveness of the criminal-debt-collection process: the nature of criminal debt, the assessment of mandatory restitution, payment schedules set by judges, and limitations due to state laws. The report provides recommendations related to these issues to improve the collection of criminal debt.

Bannon, Alicia et. al. Criminal Justice Debt: A Barrier to Reentry. (2010). Many states are imposing new and often onerous “user fees” on individuals with criminal convictions. Yet far from being easy money, these fees impose severe – and often hidden – costs on communities, taxpayers, and indigent people convicted of crimes. They create new paths to prison for those unable to pay their debts and make it harder to find employment and housing as well to meet child support obligations.

Federal Courts: Differences Exist in Ordering Fines and Restitution. (1999). Washington, DC: General Accounting Office, General Government Division. This report identifies the percentage of offenders who were ordered to pay fines or restitution in fiscal year 1997, as well as differences across judicial circuits and districts in the percentage of offenders who were ordered to pay fines or restitution, and then provides officials' opinions about possible reasons for those differences.

UK Ministry of Justice Fine Payment Work Process Study. (2010).

The British Courts Act 2003 made provision for people from whom their fines could not be recovered by any of the normal means to work off the outstanding financial penalty by undertaking unpaid work. This arrangement, called Fine Payment Work (FPW), was initially piloted in five court areas in 2004 (Cambridgeshire, Cheshire, Cumbria, Devon and Cornwall, and South Yorkshire), later extended to South Wales in 2007 and Cleveland in 2008. The aims of Fine Payment Work were to improve fine enforcement and the credibility of the use of the fine as a legitimate option.

Fines and Restitution: Improvement Needed in How Offenders` Payment Schedules Are Determined. (1998). Washington, DC: General Accounting Office This report was created in response to a request from the U.S. Congress to study orders of fines and restitution imposed on federal criminal offenders. The report identifies guidance available to probation officers on how to determine payment schedules for offenders who must pay fines to the government or restitution to their victims and to assess how offenders' payment schedules were actually determined while under court supervision.

How to Use Structured Fines (Day Fines) As an Intermediate Sanction. (1996). Washington, DC: Bureau of Justice Assistance, Justice Management Institute and Vera Institute of Justice. This monograph presents guidelines for policymakers and criminal-justice practitioners who are considering using structured fines as part of their overall sentencing system. This work provides planning and operational instructions applicable to every jurisdiction, such as how to set goals and priorities, develop a unit scale that ranks offenses by severity, calculate fine amounts, and impose the structured fine sentence.

Report on the Results of the Arizona Judiciary Pilot Collections Project. (2011). This report describes a temporary fine reduction program, or partial amnesty program. The report concludes that the program is not fiscally justifiable due to the operational costs of the fine reduction.

Standards Relating to Courts Costs: Fees Miscellaneous Charges and Surcharges. (August 1986). COSCA Committee to Examine Court Costs The standards offer definitions and advocate principles representing what the committee believed should exist in an "ideal" judicial system. The standards are offered with an understanding of the historical, political, and budgetary realities facing courts and legislative bodies and are intended to be used as a model when states consider changes in their fees systems.