Wow, can you imagine the work environment? Makes you want to go volunteer. If it is that understaffed, then for their sanity something needs to be done. Has anyone ever been to the West Virginia Location?
Hopefully in 2022 when renewals switch from automatic 1 year to 5 years the paperwork burden will decrease. Glad I requested multi-year on mine from the get go.
No haven't been there, but have seen such an environment. They worked so hard to get fairly current, then were shut down. Later IT issues that they can't get addressed properly.
In business, you could have the flexibility to fix it. We once acquired a company whose distribution center was two months behind in processing returns. My policy was that you could never leave a week with any unprocessed. Now, clearly they were incapable of catching up without something drastic and they'd lost incentive to even try. I wanted to catch up in one month. That meant processing three months worth in one month. The only way that gets done is more people and more hours. We hired part time people and temporarily moved people from other departments. We freed all people there to work as many hours as they desired for that one month, all the overtime at time and a half. I recall speaking personally to them and asking each person if there was one thing they could really use money for, then saying they could have it in one month if they'd really sacrifice. I know one person who worked 12 hour days, seven days a week for the month, made 2.5 times their normal pay. Their goal was taking their family to Disneyworld on vacation. I remember one person commenting on their hours and they said, "You don't understand, I'm working on Disney." Once caught up, they stayed that way. We threw them a little party when the returns area was 100% empty the first time.
Unfortunately, the CG Documentation Unit doesn't have any of that flexibility. Temporary help could be of great benefit on the basic documentations. I bet they have plenty of employees who would like some extra pay through extra hours for a while, all voluntary. I've never once asked for volunteers to work extra that I didn't get plenty to volunteer. The reality is there is no person authorized and with the power and control to fix the problem.
Will five years help? A very tiny bit. Renewals are not the problem. On December 13, renewals were only 2 days behind. Commercial Fish Initial, Certificates of Ownership, Deletions, Research, and Abstracts were current and Commercial Initial was only 10 days behind.
It was everything else. Initial Recreation 3 months, Mortgages 8 months, Satisfaction of Liens 11 months, and Notice of Claim of Liens 14 months. I find it ironic that a common reason for documentation is liens and yet that's the area they handle so poorly. I know someone not long ago who lost a sale of their boat because they'd paid their lien off and couldn't get the CG to record it.
