I took office Jan. 1 and inherited a stack of hot checks to either collect or file on. I am hoping someone can tell me what they think about this -- there are several checks from other counties in the stack. I am not going to attempt to collect them and I can't file on them here and so I am sending them to the correct C.A. to work them (yours is already in the mail Michael!) But it did make me wonder - how would you know if another county was collecting hot checks from your county, and keeping the fee pursuant to CCP 102.007? Seems logical to me that if you can't FILE it in your county, you shouldn't be collecting it and putting the funds in your county's hot check fund. Am I missing something?

At least in Nolan County, we have more checks than we can say grace over. If we find one that belongs to someone else, we are more than happy to give it back - and they are welcome to fees, fines and all other revenue.

Thanks for sending me more work! I received the check. I agree with Lisa, we send checks to the correct county or more typically back to the merchant to be filed in the correct county. I suppose your merchants could tell you if they were receiving $ from or sending checks to other counties. When we started our hot check program, I made it a point to go to the merchants personally and let them know what our office could do and how hard we would work for them. I still deliver the restitution checks to the merchants personally on occassion to get feedback and see if they have any questions.

We have plenty of checks here, too, and occasionally find on the eve of filing a case that the address that the complainant gave us is in another county. We then ship the packet to the proper county. I don't see improper-venue collections as a problem, though.The "teeth" to the collection effort is the prospect of prosecution. I would think it highly unsatisfying to the prosecutor and to the complainant to do collections without any prospect of being able to follow through with a prosecution. Of course, venue can be proper in several places in a theft, but if a prosecutor knows there is no basis for venue, the collection effort might start to give off an ethics stench.