Iowa Senate Bill 2316 makes changes to Iowa’s court debt collection practices. The amendments allow people to enter into a payment plan for court debt and outline the process for modifying payment plans when people are unable to pay. This bill also outlines the county attorney’s role in collecting overdue fines and fees and specifies percentages of collected debt that will be allocated to the county and the state.
You can read the full text here.
Key Provisions
- Repeals part of a previous statute that prohibits the fines and fees included in a defaulted payment plan from being placed into a new payment plan.
- Requires 28% (instead of 40%) of fines and fees collected by the county attorney to be retained by the county and “the remaining 72.0% [instead of 60% as the previous legislation states] to be paid to the clerk of district court and deposited in the General Fund of the State of Iowa.”
- Requires the State Auditor to review the collection rate for each county collecting delinquent court debt; file a report of the result of the review with the General Assembly by January 1, 2018; and distribute the report to the Judicial Branch and each county collecting debt.
Status: Enacted