Hawaii’s Crime Victims Compensation Fund — which helps pay for funeral, medical and other crime victims’ costs — has received its largest single payment of $150,000 as the result of a settlement in a corporate tax case.
State Attorney General Doug Chin and Pamela Ferguson-Brey, executive director of the Crime Victim Compensation Commission, which administers the Crime Victims Compensation Fund, posed Thursday with a symbolic check for $150,000 that represented the biggest payment into the fund “that has ever been given in history,” Chin said.
Under a plea agreement between Chin’s office and Logistics Management
Services Inc., the company pleaded no contest to two misdemeanor counts of wilful failure to file tax returns or supply information for 2013 and 2014.
The company is no longer listed with the state Department of Commerce and Consumer Affairs. A company with the same named based in Cape Coral, Fla., could not be reached Thursday, and its website was no longer active.
An Oklahoma company also with the same name operates in Indiana, Ohio and Tennessee but has never had a presence in Hawaii, according to Clintt Cobb, vice president/corporate controller for the Oklahoma-based company also called Logistics Management Services Inc.
Following the shooting deaths of seven Xerox Corp. co-workers in 1999 in Hawaii’s worst mass murder, the Crime Victims Compensation Fund paid more than $60,000 in expenses, Ferguson-Brey said.
The fund also has paid as much as $70,000 in a single year for funeral expenses, she said.
The Crime Victims Compensation Fund receives no general fund money from the state, and instead relies on criminals to pay into it.
But payments by defendants are often unreliable and rarely cover a victims’ actual costs for medical treatment and therapy, Ferguson-Brey said.
“They end up being re-victimized,” she said.
Chin said, “Not everybody is capable of paying restitution. … This is a big boost to the fund.”
The federal government matches 60 percent of every dollar that the Crime Victims Compensation Fund pays to victims.
So the $150,000 infusion from Logistics Management Services Inc. will be multiplied to better help victims of crime in the islands, Ferguson-Brey said.