Long-suffering taxpayers are entitled to an explanation from the Minister of Justice about the nearly $100 million in fines and reparations the courts have cancelled in the past financial year.
There may well be perfectly adequate explanations for such vast sums being written off, but to the casual observer, unencumbered by a knowledge of the arcane workings of the justice system and the courts, such revelations could be construed as tantamount to a conspicuous and unwelcome admission of failure in the administration of justice in this country.
What is the point of imposing such fines if, through dogged resistance or cunning subterfuge, criminal individuals or contravening companies are able to delay the day of reckoning to the point that the system eventually capitulates?
Is the imposition of such fines and reparations so unrealistic in the first place that the fault could be said to lie with the statutory bodies responsible for imposing them, with the sentencing guidelines, or the judiciary's interpretation of such; or is it more the case that the mechanisms for monitoring and collecting the resultant funds are hopelessly overburdened or inefficient?
These are matters likely to have creased the conscious thought of many citizens on hearing of the courts' actions with respect to an amount of money which could be constructively used in other fields of social endeavour - or indeed as a reprieve from the tax burdens that constrain the lifestyles of ordinary working people.
According to the Ministry of Justice, courts wiped $95.1 million from the total $806 million in unpaid fines between July 2008 and June last year.
The latter figure is eye-wateringly immense in itself, but the $95.1 million write-off is significantly higher than the $81.6 wiped the previous year and the $31.6 million five years earlier.
Further, in the first five months of the 2009-10 financial year - July to November - fines worth $50.1 million were wiped.
If that rate of relief is maintained for the remainder of the year, a total write-off of $120 million or so might be anticipated.
Some of this is down to companies - the biggest single fine cancellation so far this year being for an amount of $125,000 owed by an unnamed Auckland company, while two others from the same city each had fines of $60,000 wiped, and a Wellington company was released from an $85,000 penalty.
Individuals typically account for a high proportion of the fines imposed and a sense of the scale can be ascertained by amounts accrued but not yet remitted this year: for instance, a 25-year-old Auckland man owes $12,488 for traffic offences.
Likewise the biggest fine imposed on an individual this financial year is $391,671 for fraudulently using a document for pecuniary advantage, with other fines of $325,000 for fraud and $138,397 for evading taxes respectively imposed.
Thus far, the exposure of the extent of fine and reparation remission have been accompanied by only the sketchiest of explanations.
Fines, apparently, are cancelled if they are unpaid after the enforcement date, or if the court believes the defaulter cannot pay.
Ministry of Justice Collections general manager Bryce Patchell has added that fines are usually replaced by community work terms, home detention, curfews or imprisonment.
With respect to companies, the courts could seize assets or income belonging to a company when it ceased trading, but its limited liability status prevented the courts from seizing assets belonging to directors or from deducting payment from a director's personal income, Mr Patchell explained.
None of this is expecially satisfactory, and neither does it go any distance to reassuring the general public as to the efficacy of the fines and reparations system.
Nor does it take into account the significant infrastructural resources and expense required to oversee the system.
Further, while it is evidently the case that significant proportions of outstanding fines are habitually cancelled, precedent is an especially weak premise on which to perpetuate a flawed practice.
When Parliament, and more particularly the Government, returns from its summer recess it could do worse than to establish a focused working party to provide some urgent answers to what is, quite simply, an unacceptable waste of time and money.
