Posted on

JP and Municipal Court Checklist for the new OCA Report – IMPORTANT

The new OCA reporting requirements for your courts goes into effect for your September 2011 report.
Follow these steps below to be sure that you’re ready!
  1. Complete your August 2011 report. We don’t want to change any of your codes until you have turned in your August data.
  2. Download and install August 18a HCSS Court update or newer
  3. Switch to new report – Go to OCA Monthly State Report and click on the button in the upper left hand corner of the screen to switch to the new report. You can do this before you are ready to run your September report, but only after you have completed your August 2011 report.
  4. Click on help button on OCA Monthly State Report and review HCSS help pages and videos. You can also view the help pages and videos at http://help.hillcountrysoftware.com
  5. Update Court info. (Help pages – page 1)
  6. Review the difference between Active/Inactive and Pending/Closed and how to designate a case Inactive. (Help pages – pages 2 and 3)
  7. Update subset groups on offense codes. See OCA list of how DPS offenses codes are categorized if you are unsure of a subset group. (Help pages – pages 2 and 3)
  8. Update disposition codes. Most of these should be correct, but you will want to review them just in case. (Help pages – pages 2 and 3)
  9. Create new offense code for Possession of Drug Paraphernalia – Juvenile if necessary (Help pages – page 4)
  10. Be sure you are using the Adult/Juvenile switch on cause screen (Help pages – page 4)
  11. Review new proceeding options on note records (Help pages – page 5)
  12. Be sure you are using receipts to show Community Service. The new reports requires reporting of cases fully or partially satisfied by community service and this is how we track this. (Help pages – page 5)
  13. Call HCSS if you have any questions!

PDFDownload a PDF copy of these instructions

Posted on

County & District Clerks… OCA is ready for your reports!

In a letter dated May 6th, 2011, The Office of Court Administration notified its courts that it was finally ready to accept the new monthly reports. OCA will start accepting their new monthly reports on Thursday, May 12th, 2011.

As a recap, OCA adopted new rules for reporting that were to take affect September 1, 2010. Unfortunately they were not completely ready to accept those new reports.

HCSS has had the new reporting requirements in place since September of last year, so the submission of your new reports should go smoothly. Remember that unless OCA grants a waiver for good cause, the clerk must submit the reports by electronic means —by entering or uploading the data directly into the Court Activity Reporting and Directory System. Since they haven’t been accepting reports since September of last year, each court will have to submit their reports for the past 9 months. OCA also requires each report be submitted in order, starting with September 2010.

OCA has made several changes to dispositions and sentencing information and IADT accurately tracks the status of all of the cases and their Active or Inactive status as required. There were also changes to offense classifications that added several new categories. Those categories have been in IADT since September so if you haven’t already made those changes to your offense codes, you will need to adjust those categories in order to get a correct OCA report. While making these changes is necessary, we’ve made the process very quick and simple.

When  you’re working on your reports, make sure that you have the latest update installed on your system. If you have any questions on how those requirements are handled in IADT, please call our tech support line at 1-800-422-1982. You can also find some help in our new online help system HERE.