Registered to Nowhere
All David Lippe, 44, wanted to do was re-register his 2005 Volkswagen Jetta. But when he tried in mid-November to take care of that routine business online with the D.C. Department of Motor Vehicles, he repeatedly got an error message.
He went through the steps about six times before finally reaching the DMV’s IT department. An employee walked him through the procedure and also got an error message. But the employee had a solution to the problem: Lippe was told to register his Jetta by mail.
Unfortunately, one entity believed his attempts had been successful—his credit card company. In fact, it showed that his car had been registered 25 times at $199 a pop. “This is potentially eating into my Christmas spending,” he says. “What if my partner doesn’t get a gift? Will the District give him a gift?”
Janis Hazel, DMV’s public information officer, says her department has no record of charging Lippe for his registration at all. Lippe counters with his credit card bill. With five days of holiday shopping left, the DMV finally cleared up the issues.
After the holiday, Lippe says he mailed in a check for his registration and now vows never to use dc.gov’s services again. “This was an extremely isolated incident,” Hazel says. “We’ve not had an incident like this previously.”
2 Responses to “Registered to Nowhere”
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December 28th, 2007 at 4:11 pm
So an IT system screwed up. Like that’s never happened to anyone before somewhere other than DMV? Bashing DMV is a fun pastime, but all I can say is life is about 1000 times better since all the online services became available. Even the in-person centers are way better as far as organization and wait time.
Personally, I’ve never had trouble with the online services, and from my perspective DMV has gone from the bane of my existence about 10 years ago to one of the best (only?) functioning agencies in the DC government.
January 3rd, 2008 at 6:21 pm
Boy, this sounds familiar! The same thing just happened to my girlfriend, only she was booking an airline ticket on USAir. The system took her all the way to the payment confirmation submission and then came back with an error. She went through this process three times before it went through and she received a confirmation number via e-mail (but only one). Time goes by… and she receives her credit card bill with three charges to USAir within minutes of each other, for the same route. The route is described on the bill - but no confirmation numbers are shown. When she called USAir they told her she had booked three tickets and they could not be canceled (never mind the fact that it is not possible for the same person to sit in three seats for one flight in most cases.) - end of discussion. I guess the credit card company is the next step - Mr. Lippe is lucky it’s a shorter distance to the DMV’s people than it is to USAir’s, who are of course in a call center in Bangalore.