Over One Million Dollars in FIU Parking Citations Remain Unpaid

Teresa Schuster/ Staff Writer

If your FIU inbox has ever been flooded by the annoying emails from FIU Parking and Transportation for unpaid parking tickets, you’re not alone.

In fact, about 54,000 FIU parking tickets have not been paid for.

The Parking and Transportation Department has 1.2 million in uncollected parking citations over the past seven years. The average ticket is around 22 dollars.

A problem in Parking and Transportation’s online system was partially responsible for this. Its NuPark system was not integrated with PantherSoft, enabling students to graduate without paying their citations, contrary to university policy.

After a recent audit, the department discovered the problem.

“We weren’t aware of this happening, that those registration holds and graduation holds were not pending,” said Brenda Dome, Parking and Transportation’s director.

 “When the audit was conducted we identified that there were some [holds] that have not been placed.”

Dome says there was a “file drop” in the system, since the department placed holds manually. When asked why the systems were not integrated before, she said the manual system “worked well.”

“We just realized…there was an opportunity to make this even better,” she said.

Since the audit, the department has integrated the systems.

“The integration happening every hour just makes it more seamless so we work together with student financials to create that integration,” said Dome. “We don’t expect that problem again.”

Dome says the department has not lost any revenue from the problem and is within their collection threshold.

“Our collection rates are about 80% of the outstanding amounts, which is in alignment with the rest of the universities,” said Dome. “No revenue was ever lost because we have other methods to employ collection of the citations.”

Those methods include immobilizing vehicles, directly collecting citations from employees’ paychecks, and turning citations over to collection agencies, which the department typically does after 45 days.

Students are still allowed to register for classes without paying their citations.

“We try not to interfere, or create a situation where the students cannot register for a small amount [of a citation], so we allow them to continue with their academic progress and they can register for classes, but at the end if there’s any balance due, there’s a hold on graduation and transcripts until the account is fully paid,” said Dome.

Dome says it’s also difficult to collect citations from visitors to campus.

“We do have an interface with [the] DMV, we can send a letter, but [visitors] come one time to campus and they don’t return again, or [they have] out of state plates and privacy plates,” she said. “We transfer them over to our collection agencies and they take over the effort to collect.”