Last Friday, California state Judge Michael P. Kenny slapped down the state's Department of Justice over misuse of fees paid by gun owners.
When a firearm is purchased from a gun dealer in California, a $19 Dealer Record of Sale (DROS) fee is charged. This fee was created in 1982 to specifically cover the cost of conducting a background check. Over the years, the cost of the fee has increased, as have the number of government activities it funds.
However, the law allowing the fee says that the fee is to be "no more than necessary to fund" the outlined activities, like the background checks and later the Armed and Prohibited Persons System (APPS).
And here's where we run into the problems
It turns out that the last time the state considered whether $19 was "no more than necessary to fund" the DOJ's firearms programs was 2004, when it set the fee at $19. In the years since, the state has raided that fund, which continually runs a huge surplus, for other programs.
Therefore, logically, the $19 fee is far more than necessary to fund the activities required of them under the law.
Matthew D. Cubeiro, one of the lawyers on the case, summarized it this way:
DROS fee funds are only supposed to be used to cover limited and specific expenses, like conducting background checks on gun buyers. But to avoid spending money from other sources on general law enforcement activities, DOJ has for years been improperly overcharging gun buyers and raiding the DROS funds to cover expenses that DROS funds were never intended to pay for. So now the Court has ordered the DOJ to review whether the $19 fee currently charged for firearm purchases in California is being improperly set too high.
…
Since first established at $19 per transaction (and $15 for each additional handgun) however, DOJ has never done the statutorily required review to determine whether the current $19 DROS fee is “no more than necessary to fund” the certain specifically authorized costs it is supposed to cover. DOJ failed to identify any internal process that would trigger the mandatory review of the current fee, and instead offered vague excuses about the level of review it should perform. And DOJ failed to produce any documentation to substantiate its claim that it performs “regular monitoring” of the DROS fee as required by law. So the Court found that DOJ’s failure to review the amount of the DROS fee since 2004 was “insufficient to comply with the ministerial duty” imposed on DOJ, and that DOJ must now conduct such a review.
In other words, DOJ has been charging gun buyers too much for the DROS fee, spending DROS money on unauthorized expenses, and going out of its way to avoid accounting for it.
The good news is that California gun purchasers may save a little money next time they buy a firearm. The bad news is that it's taken decades to hold the state's DOJ to account.
