An estimated 150,000 cars didn’t have insurance in Idaho in 2019, according to the Idaho Transportation Department. The following year, a new state law took effect: Idaho drivers had to provide proof of insurance to the Idaho Transportation Department’s Division of Motor Vehicles (DMV)—or face mandatory suspension and reinstatement fees.

The law also established enforcement mechanisms. The DMV had to determine every month whether vehicle owners had insurance, and if they didn’t, the DMV sent warning letters to those drivers before suspending their registration.

For the DMV, the resulting workload was overwhelming. “We were sending out 40,000 to 45,000 notices a month,” says Lisa McClellan, administrator, Idaho DMV.

Adding to the problem: About half of those notices were being sent to vehicle owners who did, in fact, have insurance. That’s because the Idaho DMV could access data only from insurance carriers within the state, not out of state.

To keep up with all the extra work, the Idaho DMV hired 12 to 16 temporary workers at a time just to answer phone calls from customers angry about warning letters they mistakenly received. “Our phone system broke multiple times because of the number of phone calls coming in,” says Beverlie Edwards, portfolio program manager, Idaho DMV.

Verifying Insurance in Real Time

After building a portal for drivers to self-report their insurance information, the Idaho DMV got the number of monthly notices down to 30,000. Better, but still not ideal.

So, in 2023, the Idaho DMV partnered with MV Solutions, whose real-time verification system can instantly determine whether a vehicle has an insurance policy in another state. In June of that year, the DMV launched MV Solutions’ Idaho Insurance Verification System (IdahoIVS).

“We take a manual process and make it all electronic and a lot more efficient,” says Tracy Laws Corson, implementation coordinator, MV Solutions. “Within seconds, a clerk at a DMV counter or an officer outside a car gets a ‘yes’ or ‘no’ on whether a vehicle is insured.”

“We were sending out 40,000 to 45,000 notices a month.”

Lisa McClellan, Administrator, Idaho DMV

The volume of monthly warning letters plummeted from 30,000 to 10,000—and those 10,000 letters are now accurately going to drivers without insurance. Plus, the number of customer calls related to insurance verification fell from almost 1,000 a day to fewer than 100. As a result, the Idaho DMV was able to reduce the number of workers who field customers’ calls from at least a dozen to just four—and those four don’t work on this issue full-time.

A Single Source of Truth

“It’s a great success story,” McClellan says of the IdahoIVS. It was so successful, in fact, that the Idaho DMV and MV Solutions partnered again.

As of this year, the Idaho DMV leverages MV Solutions to determine whether drivers have SR-22 coverage—additional proof of insurance and financial responsibility typically required of high-risk drivers convicted of serious driving offenses. MV Solutions also identifies drivers with SR-26—
the cancellation form for drivers who no longer need SR-22 coverage.

Prior to MV Solutions, the DMV had to rely on multiple sources of information related to SR-22 and SR-26. Now, MV Solutions serves as a single, reliable source of truth: “We know that everything we have has come directly from the insurance companies,” Edwards says.

MV Solutions has eliminated all of the Idaho DMV’s manual entries and reviews related to SR-22 and SR-26—saving almost 3,000 labor hours per year.

“Working with MV Solutions has been the best experience,” McClellan says. “They were so helpful and accommodating, they met their deadlines, and they delivered everything they were supposed to.”