The Check’s in the Mail . . . but Where Is the Mail?

The DMV office in Westminster apparently has lost the mail it received--or somehow mail was not delivered--on Feb. 29, causing a problem for some drivers whose car registration fees weren’t processed.

So far, at least one motorist is known to have been stopped by police and cited for not having a current registration.

The DMV blames the post office for failing to deliver the mail that day, but the post office says it has a receipt for delivery of a portion of the mail.

“We have a receipt saying that they did get mail delivery that date,” Terri Bouffiou, a postal service spokeswoman, said Wednesday.

The post office may have a signed receipt, but the mail bag that was supposed to be dropped at the DMV’s Westminster Consolidated Registration Center didn’t require anyone’s signature, countered DMV spokeswoman Chris Humphries.

Another DMV representative, Elaine Jennings, said the “paperwork never got to the DMV or wasn’t delivered. We have no knowledge how this happened.”

The registration center, one of the state’s largest, occupies the same facility as the DMV’s office, handling paperwork from 600 car dealerships throughout Orange County that sell vehicles and send in the registration forms on behalf of the buyers. Ten dealerships were affected by the mail mix-up, according to the DMV.

The center receives a mailbag of more than 2,000 items daily from the post office, but it’s unknown how many checks for registration were included Feb. 29.

“This is a serious thing to us,” said Bouffiou, “because we need to find out what’s going on. Is it mail theft? Employee theft? We searched all those records and it seems very odd to us that if they didn’t get their mail delivered on Feb. 29, why we aren’t hearing about this until April 16?”

In addition, Bouffiou said the DMV has yet to file a tracer form, which is needed to help find out where the mail went.

Bouffiou said that besides having the receipt for certified mail delivery, a preliminary investigation has shown that the regular mail carrier was on duty that day and did not report any irregularities to a supervisor.

The carrier “would not leave the post office without that sack of mail,” Bouffiou said. “If she didn’t have one, she would have gone to her supervisor, because it would have been so unusual an event and we would have begun efforts to find it. That didn’t happen and, in fact, when searching our records, we have a signed certificate.”

Meanwhile, the checks still have not been found and they have not been deposited.

DMV officials said they did not discover anything amiss until they began receiving phone calls from dealerships that hadn’t received their copy of registrations.

“When we started getting a few more dealers calling, we realized it was from that whole work day,” Humphries said.

Word of the mishap has not reached law enforcement agencies.

Officer Joan Rivas with the California Highway Patrol’s Westminster office said there has been no briefing or bulletin circulated about the problem.

Several dealerships contacted in Westminster said they routinely hand-carry new car registration documents to the Westminster center to avoid any problems with the mail.

DMV officials said they will help the motorist who was cited, and later complained to the news media, by writing a letter to show a judge excusing the motorist of responsibility. Other concerned motorists can contact their dealers to find out if their checks have not been deposited.