The D.C. Department of Motor Vehicles says it is reviewing 15 years worth of DUI and other traffic-related convictions to check if they were properly placed on drivers’ records, which in some cases would have triggered a license suspension or revocation.

The admission of the broad review of convictions was included in a pair of letters from the DMV to members of the D.C. Council who have been asking questions in the wake of revelations over the past month that DUI convictions may not have been consistently recorded by the DMV, meaning that some drivers would not have had their licenses suspended or revoked as required by law.

The initial mishap was revealed in late May, after DMV officials said they were unaware that Nakita Walker, the woman now charged with murder for a fatal crash on Rock Creek Parkway in mid-March that killed three people, had three prior DUI convictions in D.C. and another two in Virginia, which should have resulted in her license being revoked. (Police say Walker was legally intoxicated at the time of the fatal crash.) The DMV officials eventually walked back that claim, instead telling the council that a “technical miscommunication” between D.C. Superior Court and the DMV’s driver records system had kept some of the DUI convictions from being property recorded.

Earlier this month DMV workers told DCist/WAMU that the problem is DESTINY, the agency’s two-decade-old system for managing driver records, which they said hasn’t been properly maintained and doesn’t always play well with other systems. While the DMV has said for years it would like to fully replace the system with a newer one, it has more recently told the council that it is modernizing it instead.

In a letter late last week to Councilmember Charles Allen (D-Ward 6) and a separate one to Councilmember Christina Henderson (I-At Large), DMV director Gabriel Robinson said the revelations from Walker’s case have prompted the DMV to start reviewing convictions from Superior Court dating back some 15 years to see if they were properly included in driver records. He also conceded that the agency was still unaware of how big the problem may actually be.

“D.C. DMV is unable to ascertain the number of missing convictions at this time,” wrote Robinson. “D.C. DMV is aggressively working with D.C. Superior Court to obtain all conviction information going back to 2008. As D.C. DMV receives the files, we are manually reviewing the files to determine which convictions were not placed on the appropriate record.”

In an interview with DCist/WAMU, Allen said these admissions were both problematic and an indication of just how far the issue may go.

“That the DMV does not still does not have a sense of the magnitude of how many individuals had convictions and their license was never suspended is really problematic,” he said. “And I think the fact that it they’re making a request for the data back to 2008 from Superior Court helps show us the scope and how long this has been going on.”

In his letter to Allen, Robinson also said that the fault may not only lie with the DMV. He said that while the agency and Superior Court had agreed on a naming convention for conviction files that needed to be transmitted electronically, at some point the court “stopped using the agreed upon name,” thus triggering the technical snafus that may have resulted in the DMV not properly receiving and recording DUI convictions.

In a statement, court spokesman Doug Buchanan took issue with Robinson’s claim.

“The D.C. courts have continuously sent the D.C. DMV the agreed upon records with the requested and approved pre-identified codes under the current and longstanding agreement between the court and DMV,” he wrote. “It was only recently that that the court was notified by District officials that they have been unable to retrieve and find some number of files the court has been providing the D.C. DMV for the last several years. The D.C. courts continue to work directly with District officials to ensure they are receiving the information we have sent them and continue to share with them daily, in accordance with the existing data filing sharing agreement.”

But even if the court had a role to play in DUI convictions not being properly communicated to the DMV, Allen says the DMV itself can’t escape responsibility.

“The fact that a small coding change might have taken place from the court, for that to go unnoticed, for that to be going on for so long, I mean, it speaks to how fragile and out of date our entire system has got to be that there were no checks, no quality assurance, no ability to be able to to notice a change like that,” he said.

Moving forward, Allen said he is considering legislation to address the situation, and would also like to see an audit conducted of the file transfers between Superior Court and the DMV to gain a better understanding of the magnitude of the problem. He is also pushing to better understand the current system for out-of-state DUI convictions, which are emailed or physically sent to the DMV and then manually entered into the DESTINY system.

Robinson told Allen there are DMV employees who spent at least 20 hours of their week (and sometimes overtime) entering those convictions into the system, with the goal of doing so within 30 days of receipt from an out-of-state court or DMV. But he also said there are 713 out-of-state convictions that have not been processed yet. The DMV employees who spoke to DCist/WAMU say that means that convictions can fall through the cracks; Walker’s two DUI convictions in Virginia, for one, were never recorded on her driver record, though other traffic-related convictions were.

Allen calls this system “deeply fragile [and] vulnerable to human error.”