Paid ​“Search Fee”? City May Owe You

If you’ve paid $20 for a birth, death, or marriage certificate that the city was unable to procure, you may soon be eligible for a refund.

It turns out that a single city official imposed such a fee without the required approvals and against a state imperative — another revelation from an investigation into the city’s former registrar of vital statistics and her actions reporting 93 couples to a federal immigration office.

Now the city’s trying to figure out how to return money when possible to improperly charged residents.

The issue of improper ​“search fees” arose in an investigation released last week into that now-retired Registrar Patricia Clark’s potential violation of a Sanctuary City order by reporting couples she suspected might commit immigration fraud to a subsidiary of the Department of Homeland Security. 

In the process of examining these charges, the investigating firm New Light Investigations unearthed other forms of misconduct that Clark allegedly committed. 

The report found that she created an allegedly hostile work environment for her employees, required extra forms of identification for certain services, single-handedly altering hours of operation — and charged the $20 ​“search fee” for records requests that the office could not successfully fulfill.

The scope of that last infraction is proving difficult for the city to assess.

A state policy requires constituents to pay a $20 fee in order to procure copies of birth, death, and marriage certificates from their local municipalities.

During her tenure as registrar of vital statistics, Clark decided to take this policy one step further and charge constituents that fee even if the office could not successfully find the requested document. This typically applied to records older than 1940, which the city has not digitized.

On March 24, 2023, Clark asked the city’s Information Technology department to update the online forms for requesting these documents with the following new sentence: ​“Search fee is applied if there is no matching certificate found with the information provided.” In other words, constituents will pay the $20 fee even if they don’t receive the document they asked for.

Months later, on September 15, state Registrar of Vital Records Yvette Gauthier emailed Clark that she had learned about the fee from a constituent and instructed Clark that this was counter to state policy.

“There is no search or research fee in our laws for vital records, so you cannot charge for that,” Gauthier wrote.

According to the city investigation, two assistant registrars indicated that Clark was aware of this email and continued to charge the search fees regardless, stating (according to the registrars) that ​“it’s up to the Registrar’s discretion.”

Clark did not respond to a request for comment. But the registrars’ accounts echoed what Clark told New Light’s investigators herself, as summarized in the investigation. ​“Clark indicated that she did not seek approval of this fee from [her supervisor, Brooke] Logan, citing her understanding that she had the authority to run her department as she saw fit as part of being hired as the Registrar,” the report stated. Clark told the investigators that she believed the fee was appropriate because when a record couldn’t be located, the requester would still receive a certified letter indicating that the search yielded no results.

The ​“search fee” language remained on request forms for copies of marriage and death certificate in the Office of Vital Statistics until an Independent reporter inquired about them on Friday.

The forms have since been replaced, according to city spokesperson Lenny Speiller. ​“Search fees are not being charged by the Office of Vital Statistics, nor have they been charged since December 1^st when Ms. Clark was put on paid administrative leave,” he wrote in an email.

Refund Process In Works

According to Speiller, the city has no way of knowing how much in ​“search fees” Clark’s office collected. 

That’s because the office used the same expense code for the unauthorized search fees and other valid fees within its payment system. In total, Speiller said, the Office of Vital Statistics collected $615,630 in ​“licenses, permits, and fees” throughout Fiscal Year 2023.

In the meantime, the city is working on a system to reimburse constituents for search fees that they shouldn’t have been charged.

“The Health Department and Finance Department are currently in the process of setting up a reimbursement system to issue these payments, and the reimbursement policy will be posted in the Office of Vital Statistics and on its webpage,” Speiller stated.

He added that anyone seeking a refund would need to provide the letter or form they had received from the Office of Vital Records indicating that a document they had requested (and paid for) could not be found.