As a member of the public / media / researcher, I want to be able to see fine collection information on NRCED so that I can have confidence that government is enforcing its environmental laws.
As government, I want to be able to show fine collection information so that it has a specific and general deterrent effect, thus improving environmental and natural resource outcomes.
As government, I want fine collection information to be as recent and up to date as possible so that its deterrent effect is maximized (b/c out of date fine collection information is less effective).
As government staff, I want fine collection information to be added and updated as automatically as possible so that instead of spending my time manually transforming data, I can spend that time analyzing the information for business intelligence.
Description
Fine collection information applies enforcement actions that have monetary penalties, including:
Violation Tickets
Court Convictions
Administrative Penalties
While it's great that we can already show the public that we issue those actions and that violators are penalized, the public still has the question: what good are fines if we can't collect on them? And right now, we can't answer that question.
It is also not unusual for us to receive information requests such as "what percentage of Wildlife Act violation tickets are paid?" Again, we cannot easily answer that question currently.
Is challenging and cumbersome to create manually, especially for staff that do not have strong data analysis skills
Is often out of date and inaccurate when it is published for the simple reason that it can take up to a year to craft
Is a static PDF, and cannot be updated to reflect changes to fine collection information
Does not easily allow for analysis such as changes over time, average time to payment, etc.
If we are able to tie fine collection information to records in NRCED, we can tell a number of new and compelling stories, such as:
What the fine payment history is for whoever the public is interested in understanding, whether it's an individual, a company, a group of companies, a sector, etc.
How much money government collects vs. how much it is unable to collect
How long it takes on average to collect fines
How government's ability to collect has changed over time (e.g. comparison to a baseline)
Whether fines are effective deterrents for certain offenders (e.g. repeat offenders) or certain offenses
And more!
Additional Context
Violation ticket fine collection data comes from ICBC and is added in to COORS, and thus may be able to be included directly in COORS-CSV Ticket uploads. This would be an ideal outcome and is currently under investigation.
Court Conviction fine collection information is recorded in a mainframe and can be queried by Ministry of Finance staff. In order to use it, it would somehow have to be reliably linked to data that comes from COORS. However, that data does not get updated in COORS the way it gets updated for violation tickets b/c financial data lacks the necessary keys to create an update script for COORS. However, it may be possible to achieve this algorithmically in other ways.
Administrative penalty fine collection information is currently maintained by ENV in an excel spreadsheet. Since administrative penalties are added manually, we will explore adding fine collection information manually as a starting point.
Overarching User Stories
As a member of the public / media / researcher, I want to be able to see fine collection information on NRCED so that I can have confidence that government is enforcing its environmental laws.
As government, I want to be able to show fine collection information so that it has a specific and general deterrent effect, thus improving environmental and natural resource outcomes.
As government, I want fine collection information to be as recent and up to date as possible so that its deterrent effect is maximized (b/c out of date fine collection information is less effective).
As government staff, I want fine collection information to be added and updated as automatically as possible so that instead of spending my time manually transforming data, I can spend that time analyzing the information for business intelligence.
Description
Fine collection information applies enforcement actions that have monetary penalties, including:
While it's great that we can already show the public that we issue those actions and that violators are penalized, the public still has the question: what good are fines if we can't collect on them? And right now, we can't answer that question.
It is also not unusual for us to receive information requests such as "what percentage of Wildlife Act violation tickets are paid?" Again, we cannot easily answer that question currently.
In the past, government has tried to be transparent through periodic reports, such as the https://www2.gov.bc.ca/gov/content/environment/research-monitoring-reporting/reporting/environmental-enforcement-reporting/overdue-court-penalty-payment. However, that report:
If we are able to tie fine collection information to records in NRCED, we can tell a number of new and compelling stories, such as:
Additional Context