Opinion ID: 2516613
Heading Depth: 1
Heading Rank: 16

Heading: Today's Dismissal Widely Exposes OTC's Bond Forfeitures to the Risk of a Fundamental-Law Attack on the Fairness and Neutrality of the Agency Process

Text: ¶ 17 OTC appears here in two different capacities  as an administrative adjudicator and as a tax collector. In its former capacity, OTC sits as the adjudicator of bond forfeitures; in the latter, as a tax collector, its primary if not sole focus is on the government's need to protect its revenue stream from every solvent surety standing as an OTC bond obligor. Because these two functions are clearly inconsistent, OTC cannot be deemed an entirely neutral arbiter when it is called upon to declare bond forfeitures. No matter what federal or state law might say about the OTC commissioners' fitness to sit in an adjudicative capacity for declarations of forfeiture, barring the surety from access to a detached and neutral arbiter for subsequent review of the forfeiture order casts a serious doubt on the constitutional fairness of the antecedent process by which OTC is permitted to first pass on a bond forfeiture and then insulate its own decision from all available judicial scrutiny. ¶ 18 The Constitution's neutrality mandate is now extended not just to judges but to agency decisionmakers as well. [52] An administrative tribunal's impartiality is a sine qua non element of due process within the meaning of the Fifth and Fourteenth Amendments. [53] Independent judicial review will not only help maintain public confidence in the integrity of the OTC forfeiture process but also assure its procedural fairness. This court should guard against possible prejudice to the aggrieved party's constitutional and statutory rights by affording the surety the very same access to a § 225 [54] appeal that it gives a taxpayer who stands as the principal obligor on the OTC bond.