The auditing firm hired by Governor Charlie Baker’s administration to investigate the Registry of Motor Vehicles on Monday gave state lawmakers records from interviews of current and former state employees, after initially refusing to do so without legal action.
Transportation Secretary Stephanie Pollack announced the handover Monday night during an airing of WGBH’s Greater Boston news series.
The RMV has been under scrutiny after failing to revoke the license of a West Springfield man who had been charged with drunken driving, but remained on the road until this year when he allegedly caused a June crash that killed seven people in New Hampshire.
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The audit revealed that the Registry had for years neglected alerts about Massachusetts residents who broke traffic laws in other states, allowing those drivers to stay on the road.
The 106-page report was made public in October. But state lawmakers examining the issues at the RMV want to look more closely at notes, recordings, and transcripts of interviews that generated information to support its findings.
Grant Thornton LLP, which has already been paid nearly $2 million for the audit, initially argued that the documents were confidential under its agreement with the state.
The firm told a Department of Transportation lawyer that any requests for the records “should be in the form of a subpoena.”
On WGBH, Pollack told host Jim Braude that the Baker administration had urged Grant Thornton from the beginning to make the records available to lawmakers, and that doing so “was the right thing to do,” she said.
“As of today, they have turned those over,” she said.
When pressed about whether or not anyone outside the Registry was aware of the years of neglect, Pollack said the review showed no evidence of that.
“Hopefully the fact that we have been able to jump on it in three months convinces people that we didn’t know about it,” she said.
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Representative William Straus, head of the Legislature’s Joint Committee on Transportation, said he had received the documents on a flash drive about 5 p.m. Monday.
He said Monday evening that he could not comment on the records before reviewing them in detail.
Abigail Feldman can be reached at abigail.feldman@globe.com.