Workers at the D.C. Department of Motor Vehicles say longstanding problems with a decades-old computer system and unresponsive managers are partly to blame for a recent controversy in which the agency did not properly flag multiple DUI convictions of a driver who has now been charged with murder for a crash on Rock Creek Parkway that killed three people.

“We were not surprised at all,” says one longtime DMV worker of the case involving Nakita Walker, 43, who allegedly crashed her car into another car in an opposing lane of traffic near the P Street exit in in mid-March after fleeing a police stop. Police say she was legally intoxicated at the time. “And there are other [cases] in the pipeline, I can assure you.”

Three longtime DMV workers who spoke to DCist/WAMU on the condition of anonymity in order to candidly share their experiences and frustrations say DUI convictions that should result in drivers having their licenses suspended for anywhere from six months to more than two years can often fall through the cracks, mainly because of a 20-year-old computer system known as DESTINY that is used to manage driver records but the workers say is buggy and in need of upgrades or a wholesale replacement.

“We’re using a 22-year-old system to do revocation and suspension of licenses,” said a second DMV employee. “We are technologically behind. There’s no way around it. I’m sure you don’t know someone using a phone from 20 years ago.”

According to court records, Walker was arrested and charged with DUI in 2015, 2018, and 2020, and was convicted in all three cases. She had also been convicted of driving-while-impaired in Northern Virginia in 2009 and 2010. During a D.C. Council hearing on traffic safety in late May, a senior D.C. official said the DMV had never been notified of the convictions, a critical step needed to revoke her license or impose other sanctions. (During a recent court hearing, Walker’s defense attorney said she had a valid license at the time of the fatal crash.)

But earlier this month, Gabriel Robinson, the director of the DMV, walked back the claim that the agency was unaware of the convictions, telling Councilmember Charles Allen (D-Ward 6) in a letter that while the conviction information had been sent electronically by D.C. Superior Court, a “technical miscommunication” with the DESTINY system prevented the convictions from having been properly recorded on Walker’s driving record.

When it was rolled out in 2002, DESTINY replaced a three-decade-old system for managing driver records that officials said was inefficient and antiquated. At the time, city officials said DESTINY would put the city to the forefront of jurisdictions using online systems to manage information and records that had to be shared across government agencies.

But DESTINY has quickly aged, paralleling similar problems with other D.C. government agency computer systems. During the pandemic, delays in a planned modernization of the city’s unemployment-benefits system created significant issues when the number of people filing for benefits skyrocketed.

“The DESTINY system has had issues for years,” says the first DMV employee. “Sometimes it picks up things and sometimes it doesn’t.”

“It’s a terrible system,” says the second worker.

A separate but related problem involves DUIs and traffic violations that occur outside of the city, like in Maryland or Virginia. In those cases, state DMVs send hard copies of any convictions to the D.C. DMV, and those are manually inputted into the DESTINY system. But the workers who spoke with DCist/WAMU say that means those convictions can sometimes fall through the cracks.

“Sometimes… there’s a backlog,” says the first DMV employee. “And sometimes those records just don’t make it [into DESTINY].”

Many of these concerns have recently been communicated to Allen, who chairs the council’s transportation committee and says he worries that Walker’s case may not be an isolated one.

“I believe we have a process that has failed clearly,” he says. “And I think that it’s it can’t just be Nakita Walker. My belief is that there will be other failures where there are individuals who had a license that should be suspended or revoked. And it hasn’t happened because the system has failed.”

On Wednesday Allen sent a letter to Robinson, the director of the D.C. DMV, requesting more information and clarification on how the agency handles DUIs and revoking driver’s licenses. Councilmember Christina Henderson (I-At Large), who has similarly expressed concern over whether Walker’s case may point to a broader problem, sent Robinson a letter of her own this week requesting data on DUI convictions and the process to entering them into the DESTINY system.

In an email, Robinson told DCist/WAMU that the DMV is working to address the problems highlighted by Walker’s case.

“D.C. DMV is implementing an action plan to resolve these issues and prevent them from happening in the future. Toward that end, we have engaged in discussions with D.C. Superior Court regarding the file transfer protocol and file naming, implementing additional processes for confirming receipt of files, file review, and quality control measures. Additionally, D.C. DMV is currently analyzing files to determine whether all files contain the correct and appropriate information,” he writes.

Robinson also says that even as it works to address existing problems, driver’s licenses are being suspended and revoked for DUI offenses, a process that doesn’t necessarily require a conviction in court. (Police officers are allowed to issue license suspension notices at the time of an arrest, though they can be appealed.) According to data from the DMV, there were 474 licenses suspended or revoked for DUI in fiscal year 2022, which ran from Oct. 2021 to Sept. 2022.

Allen says he is also concerned about how money the council has given the DMV to modernize the DESTINY system has been used. Funds have been set aside in D.C.’s capital budget to fully replace DESTINY since at least 2016, a project that’s expected to cost $22 million. But this year’s capital budget says that of $16 million allocated so far for the project, only around $8.5 million has been spent. And in budget documents submitted to the council earlier this year, the DMV referred to the project as a three-year “modernization” of DESTINY that would wrap up in 2025. (In his email, Robinson said the DMV had spent $7.2 million over the last three years on “maintenance and routine programing” of DESTINY.)

More broadly, the DMV workers who spoke to DCist/WAMU said that the issues surfaced recently don’t only point to technological problems within the agency, but also managerial ones.

“Our management is not very keen on having people tell them what’s wrong,” said the second DMV employee. “We don’t have the type of agency where we can continuously go to our superiors and say, ‘Hey, can you fix this?’, and they’re willing to listen to us.”

Moving forward, Allen says he will use the council’s oversight powers to better understand what exactly might be going wrong and how it can best be addressed. “We are digging in aggressively to find out exactly what’s wrong and chart the path to get this fixed,” he says.