Opinion ID: 2075955
Heading Depth: 2
Heading Rank: 1

Heading: The Prescribed Daily Fine and the $1,000 Maximum.

Text: Section 42-235 provides that a violator shall pay a civil penalty of $100 for each day that each report is withheld or each duty is not performed. This suggests that if the violation continues for a hundred days, the amount of the penalty is $10,000. The statute also provides, however, that the maximum penalty is $1,000 for each violation. We think that this means that after a violation has continued for ten days, the penalty has peaked at $1,000, and no further sum may be imposed. That is the plain meaning of the statutory language. This result is not without its problems. Suppose that Riggs refused to report abandoned property worth a million dollars. After ten days, Riggs would be subject to a penalty of $1,000. Thereafter Riggs would have no incentive, at least under the civil penalty provision, [40] to report or deliver the property until its next reporting obligation the following year, no matter how willful the noncompliance during the remaining 355 days might have been. We are not at liberty, however, to rewrite the statute to incorporate any desirable flexibility.