Anti-Car Theft Act

Issues Concerning Additional Federal Funding of Vehicle Title System Gao ID: GGD-99-132 August 13, 1999

In response to a surge in motor vehicle theft, Congress created the National Motor Vehicle Title Information System in 1992. The system is designed to allow users to instantly and reliably validate out-of-state motor vehicle titles for states that are retitling a vehicle and generate a history of the vehicle being retitled, including the vehicle's previously recorded odometer reading and any salvage information. The American Association of Motor Vehicle Administrators is working with the Justice Department to develop and test the system. This report determines (1) the current status of the system and (2) whether Justice has evaluated the system's expected costs and benefits to ensure that additional federal investment in the system is justified.

GAO noted that: (1) DOJ has not evaluated NMVTIS' expected life-cycle costs and benefits to ensure that additional federal funding is justified; (2) the Clinger-Cohen Act of 1996 and best practices used by public and private organizations to manage information technology investments suggest that such an evaluation will provide an analytical basis for informed investment decisions; (3) as of March 1999, the American Association of Motor Vehicle Administrators (AAMVA) expected the development and implementation of NMVTIS to cost about $34 million; (4) AAMVA is expected to update this estimate when its seven-state test of NMVTIS is finished; (5) AAMVA estimated that test would be completed within the first quarter of calendar year 2000; (6) through FY 1999, Congress has provided DOJ and the Department of Transportation with about $8 million of an expected $22 million federal investment in NMVTIS; (7) the states and AAMVA and its contractors would be expected to provide the remaining $12 million; (8) NMVTIS was designed to allow users to electronically validate an existing vehicle title and title-related information; (9) however, a potential barrier to electronically validating titles and title-related information could be the lack of full participation by all state departments of motor vehicles; and (10) although 43 states of the 47 states responding to GAO's survey thought that they could implement NMVTIS and 32 states of the 40 nonparticipating states had expressed an interest in doing so, 27 of the 47 states were concerned about how they would fund NMVTIS.

Recommendations

Our recommendations from this work are listed below with a Contact for more information. Status will change from "In process" to "Open," "Closed - implemented," or "Closed - not implemented" based on our follow up work.

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