When do we use this?
Our Ontario municipal clients have specific processes that all violations must go through. These process are referred to as POA (Provincial Offenses Act) or AMPS (Administrative Monetary Penalty System). Municipalities prescribe to one or the other of these processes.
OPS-COM supports most aspects of the POA process and is considered a Permitted Recipient under ARIS rules. The POA process includes sending out to the Transportation authority (MTO) for more information and ultimately sending unpaid violations to court for collections. This article will explain the process involved in the life-cycle of a violation for one municipality in Ontario, including interactions with the Ministry of Transportation (MTO) and the Ontario Court system.
It is important to note these violations would be issued to a vehicle by license plate number. Unless this driver is a registered user in the OPS-COM system, the actual owner of the vehicle would not be known.
You must be setup to use the MTO Lookup and the Court Requested Conviction status and workflow. This could require custom development fees to handle your setup. Currently this is only available for the Ontario Court. In addition to the OPS-COM setup, you must work with MTO to become an Authorized Requester of the MTO information. You can start this process by contacting ARIS@ontario.ca and requesting a RAW data Account.
Contact your sales representative for more information.
An Example
For this example, our Municipal client has the following violation life-cycle:
- Ticket is issued with 7 days to pay during which the fine amount may be discounted.
- On the 8th day, the fine is no longer discounted
- Weekly, all tickets that have reached their 15th day of non-payment are sent to MTO to do a lookup of relevant driver info.
- Once the MTO information comes back, we will have driver info including address and driver's license number to store temporarily in our database. Letters of impending conviction can be issued to drivers that have not paid their tickets. This is done using the letter report. If something happens during the letter report and you cannot print them all then you can re-print the report from the violation information window.
- If the violation is still outstanding on day 65 it will be sent to court and an additional court fee can be applied to the violation. A file can be generated that is compatible with the Ontario Courts System if upload is available. In addition, a summary file can be generated to include all cases submitted to court in a particular timeframe.
- When the ticket has been paid the Court will send a report back to the parking manager to let them know what the outcome was. OPS-COM Admins can use the report for information to process the payment on the violation.
Important Note about MTO Information
ARIS rules dictate the use of MTO information. This information is only temporarily stored to OPS-COM. Once the ticket is cancelled or paid all information received from MTO will be purged from the system.
Starting the Process
Let's take a closer look at the process. Up to the 15th day the violation is following the typical rules of OPS-COM. We will start the process at day 15 when the interaction with MTO begins.
The admin will run a weekly report to determine if there are outstanding violations in the system that have passed the 15 day mark. This would be done using the 'Vehicle Lookup Export' in OPS-COM. To get there click on the Violations Menu and hover over Collections.
Click Vehicle Lookup Export.
Vehicle Lookup Export Tool
The Vehicle Lookup Export Tool opens. In our example the search parameters are:
- Minimum Number of violations
- Vehicle Province or State
- Issue date or by due date
- Date range of the lookup
Send for Lookup
This search returns 3 results.
To generate the required report click on Export.
Notice there are various formats for this export:
Aris Raw Data Account: Used if you are an ARIS client using raw format lookups
Aris Abstract Account: Used if you are an ARIS client using abstract format lookups
Send to Collections: Used to send a report to a typical collections agency outside of the MTO process
A text file will be generated with the filename as SentToMTO-XX-XX-XX.txt where the X's are the date stamp (ie: SendToMTO-18-01-30.txt)
MTO Processing
MTO Export File
Here is a small sample of what the text file will look like.
Do not worry if it looks unformated or foreign as the file is set up in a custom format for MTO.
MTO Response File
The file that is returned from MTO Lookup will include Driver information such as the registered vehicle owner's name and address. This information is stored temporarily in OPS-COM and is governed by ARIS rules. The returned document will look like the following:
Import MTO Response File
To import this information into OPS-COM, click on the Violations Menu, hover over Collections and click on Vehicle Lookup Import.
The Vehicle Lookup Import file selector tool opens. Choose the file that came back from MTO and navigate to the file you wish to select for import.
Click Import. The following confirmation screen will appear.
Generation of Notices of Impending Conviction (NIC)
Once the information is imported, this information will be used to automatically populate the Notices of Impending Conviction. This letter only gets sent to the primary driver of the vehicle associated to the violation.
Go to the Letter Report to see all your violations have information from MTO.
Print the appropriate letters and mail them to the drivers.
If the ticket still remains unpaid for 65 days. It could be sent to the Ontario Court for collection. To do so, Click Violations tab, hover over Collections and click on Send to Court.
Select Court Requested Conviction Fee to add the court fee to the violation.
Some municipalities will have a fee and some may not.
For information about setting up your Admin Fees, click here.
Generate Ontario Court Report
The system will generate a report in text format that would be sent to the Ontario Court.
This file is in a specific court approved format and must be customized for each municipality.|
A summary file can be generated and exported to Excel.
This will contain a summary of all cases being sent to court in a particular time frame.
Important Note.
It is important that you configure OPS-COM with custom information in order to identify your organization specifically in the export to court report.
For each client sending information to MTO there are 4 codes we would need to put in place.
NOTE - You must request a RAW Data account from MTO. They system will not work otherwise
Case Court starts at character 3 - It is a 4 digit number
Case Jurisdiction starts at character 7 - It is a 3 digit number
Agency Code starts at character - It is alphanumeric three letters followed by three numbers (It would look something like this BYL123)
Disbursement Code starts at character - It is alphanumeric one letter followed by two numbers (It would look something like this M123)
To configure these codes go to System Settings and select the Collections Component.
Enter the values in each designated field and then click on save settings.
For those municipalities using the extra detailed version of the NIC letter where one notice is sent out for each violation rather than in bulk, it is required to toggle the "Include All Unpaid Violations" setting to be off.
Click Violations, Collections, Export Sent to Court.
The Court Requested Conviction - Already Sent Report screen displays.
Click export. In excel the summary report will be displayed.
You can print a copy to bring to court the day of hearings.
This is in a format that the court recommends.
Court Requested Conviction Fee
When you look one of these violations that was sent to court you will see that the Court Requested Conviction (CRC) fee has been added.
Flagging Paid Records
Now we will assume we have gotten back a report for the Ontario Court that this ticket is paid.
We need to flag them in the system as paid. You run this report under the Collections menu as well. Choose "Flag as Paid by Court". 
Pick your date range and click Search.
My ticket 7/1906 is shown. 
Click Flag as paid and the violation record will show the item as processed in the user's profile.
These items will also show up on the Daily Processed Report with Payment type of "Paid by Court"
Additionally, when you look at the vehicle information for this violation, the MTO information will have been purged from the system.
Note the vehicle shows No Associated Drivers.
Important
For instructions on bypassing the complete Collections process and sending the item directly to Collections/Court, refer to this wiki article.