House committee reviews bill to end DOC supervisory fees, seeks cost and collection details

Legislative counsel and Department of Corrections officials briefed the House Corrections & Institutions committee on H.635 on Jan. 28, a bill that would remove statutory authority to impose supervisory fees and forgive existing supervisory-fee debt. The measure would repeal the Title 28 authority for an up-to-$30 supervisory fee for people on probation, furlough, supervised community sentences and parole and would require DOC to cease collection and erase references to those fees in online portals and records.

John Gray of the Office of Legislative Counsel told the committee that the bill’s statutory changes are straightforward and that the session-law language is designed to "wipe the slate clean" for outstanding supervisory fees, and to remove the commissioner’s authority to enter into collection contracts tied to those fees. Gray noted the Administrative Procedure Act mechanisms that lead rules to expire when their statutory authority is repealed and said the bill asks DOC to identify and notify the Secretary of State about rules adopted under the repealed authority so those rules can be deleted.

The bill is narrow in scope but counsel cautioned the committee that Title 28 contains multiple fee authorities tied to specific services, such as fees for outpatient counseling tied to parole, deductions from offender wages, and fees connected to supervised-community-sentence programs. "There are other places in Title 28 where money can change hands," Gray said, urging attention to cross-references so fees could not be reintroduced indirectly.

Kristen Calvert, Deputy Commissioner of the Department of Corrections, described DOC’s current practice and the program’s operational profile. "We are only charging $15 per month, not the 30," Calvert said, and she described the payment channels DOC uses: an electronic payment portal, a TD Bank lockbox for mailed payments, and an annual tax set-off certification for debts 90 days in arrears and $45 or more. Calvert said DOC applies exemptions (including SSI/SSDI recipients, people in residential treatment, and some life-parole cases) and that DOC currently has a rule dating to about 2008 that authorizes use of a private collection agency, though the agency said it does not use private collectors now.

DOC presented recent fiscal figures: cash collected in fiscal year 2025 was presented as roughly $303,000, with operational expenses on the order of $20,000, and an outstanding supervisory-fee balance reported at about $3,500,000. A department staffer gave a population breakout: 4,744 people were on community supervision overall, of whom 3,864 were on probation, 576 on parole and 227 on furlough. Committee members noted most assessed fees fall on people on probation — who are ordinarily under court supervision rather than the commissioner’s custody — and pressed how money authorized by the statute flows through the system.

Committee members debated program value and cost-effectiveness. Several members questioned whether processing and collection efforts are worth the administrative burden, given what Calvert described as four staff who handle fee processing among other duties and the department’s limited recovery of assessed amounts. Members asked for a pro rata estimate of staff time spent on the program, a month-by-month average of collections, and a reconciliation of the roughly $40,000 in annual assessments versus actual recoveries.

Calvert said DOC could provide the requested detail. The committee directed DOC to return with a clarified breakdown: staff-cost estimates tied to the supervisory-fee program, an operational-cost breakout by payment avenue (electronic portal, lockbox, tax offset), the number of people included in the $3.5 million outstanding debt figure, and the annual and monthly collections figures. The department also agreed to identify the amount collected through each method and the size of account balances grouped by days in arrears.

The meeting record shows no formal vote on H.635 at this session. The committee left the matter open pending DOC’s follow-up information and additional drafting work by legislative counsel on cross-reference cleanups.

What’s next: DOC will provide the staff-cost and collections detail requested by the committee; legislative counsel and DOC staff will work on precise statutory and rule cleanup language so that the statutory repeal and any required rule deletions are coherent. The committee did not take final action on H.635 at the Jan. 28 meeting.