I have been told that my posts are too politically charged. Sooo, I will try to keep them directed at the Screening and HR industries in the future.

Can anyone tell me in other parts of the country if they have felt a severe slow down in record retreival from the court system? I know there are several issues regarding weather right now, but in california the access to public criminal records has been severely cut and resulted in massive slowdown in record retrieval. We used to be able to get a quick one day turn around on most days, but now it is stretching out to two to three days simply because we cannot get our volume done when the clerks shut down at 12pm. The reason for the slow down in California is the budget cuts.

On the weather side, we are expecting more court closures due to weather patterns starting in the midwest. They just got done digging out and here it comes again. Oh, is everyone in NJ indoors now or are they still out in the cold. Man, NJ did not financially, or physically prepare for that hurricane and Chris Christy had to suck up to Feds for help that kinda came. But thats another story.

Really nice in southern california so it should be warming up in the east really soon.

New Hampshire Court Search Fees Increase Significantly

We learned that the NH Administrative Office of Courts, through administrative rule, is mandating a significant increase in many court fees. Thanks to the folks at County House Research Inc. in Philadelphia for alerting us to this situation.

The researchers have passed on a considerable increase to all their clients (CRAs, Background Screening Firms).  They have raised the per search fees for all searches in NH to 20 per name per court and there are a minimum of two courts in each county.  Some counties have three courts.

On a side note, this seems to be happening at quite a few counties and states around the country, especially those who are hit by the economic down turn.  I have also noticed states that have not been looking at raising their access fees are those that that are more fically responsible and not in trouble, like Texas for example.  We’ll have to see what shakes out in the near future, but you can probably make a safe bet that there will more access fee raises in the near future.  This is another sign that the small and medium businesses in america have to take the hit for capital greed, but thats another story.  Lets not mix politics and business or ….  has that happend already?

California Mandated State Court Business Day Closures – Per the Council, all state courts will be closed on the third Wednesday of each month, from September 2009 through June 2010.  For further details, visit the state courts site at http://www.courtinfo.ca.gov/.

This will create delays in turn around times for all california courts, especially if there are possible records.  It is unsure if public access terminals are affected at this time, but highly probable.  The courts being closed will also create delays in getting the information into the computer systems and available to public access terminals due to the stresss that will be introduced to the court system having to work harder.  The people most effected are the clerks and the researchers trying to get information from them in a timely manner.  As researchers, we try not put the clerks in a frustrating position.  If this happens then the clerks have little or no sympathy to the researchers who are pushy and demanding.