A man uses a touchscreen at a DMV location. (Oregon Department of Transportation/Flickr)
The Oregon Driver and Motor Vehicle Services Division needs to do a better job translating its online web portal for people who don’t speak English and making sure customer data is secure, a mostly positive audit found.
The report released Wednesday by the Audits Division of the Secretary of State’s Office doesn’t address the DMV’s latest high-profile data issue: revelations that it wrongly sent information for 1,561 people who didn’t prove citizenship to election officials to automatically register them to vote. At least 10 of the incorrectly registered voters went on to vote, though election officials have since determined five of those 10 were citizens when they voted.
Gov. Tina Kotek ordered a pause to the automatic voter registration program until an independent external audit is completed. That report is expected by the end of the year.
The audit also didn’t address a May 2023 hack that put at risk personal information, including birthdates, addresses and driver’s license numbers, for approximately 3.5 million Oregonians. The hack of the file transfer service MOVEit affected more than 2,700 other agencies and organizations and more than 95 million individuals throughout the world.
Two Oregonians, Caery Evangelist and Brian Els, filed a class-action lawsuit in Marion County Circuit Court in April over the 2023 hack. The state is seeking to dismiss the lawsuit, and a judge has scheduled a call in November to set a date for a hearing on that motion.
Instead, the state audit looked at how the DMV — which has nearly 900 employees and a two-year budget of $311 million — assesses and collects fees and how well its recently expanded online services are working. Auditors found that the DMV and its computer systems are accurately assessing fees for the roughly 200,000 new drivers’ licenses and more than 350,000 renewals it processes each year, as well as for vehicle registrations, titles and license plates.
Fees for registrations and titles vary depending on the plate design, county where a driver lives, vehicle age and fuel efficiency. Auditors looked at all driver and vehicle transactions during the 2023 fiscal year — more than 20 million rows of data — and found that 99.6% of those transactions were complete, accurate and valid.
But they also found that Oregonians who don’t speak English or have limited English proficiency struggle to use the state’s online portal for renewing licenses, vehicle registrations and updating addresses. That portal, DMV2U, relies on Google Translate to translate directions to other languages, and auditors found that it didn’t work well on mobile devices and often failed to translate the site’s content.
The audit also found that the DMV wasn’t doing enough to make sure employees could access only data they needed and closing accounts when employees quit.
“Without robust access controls, unauthorized individuals can clandestinely access sensitive data, copy it and potentially make undetected alterations or deletions for malicious intent or personal gain,” the report said.
DMV Administrator Amy Joyce wrote in a letter attached to the audit that she agreed with each of the auditor’s recommendations, which included having a more diverse group of people test its online services and periodically reviewing access to DMV data.
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