penalty threshold only applies to bills created by that org unit

[April Durrence]

Evergreen only counts the bills created by the Org Unit that sets the Patron Exceeds Fines penalty when calculating the billing totals to match against the policy. This seems unintuitive, is not well documented, and is not the desired behavior for a consortium which allows Group Penalty Thresholds to be set at a system level.

Scenario: A patron whose home library is in Org Unit A with $30 in outstanding fines billed by Org Unit A, goes to Org Unit B to check out items. Both Org Unit A and Org Unit B have a $10 Group Penalty Threshold policy, but patron is not blocked by either policy. Because the $30 was not billed by Org Unit B (where the patron is checking out), the patron is not blocked by Org Unit B's Patron Exceeds Fines penalty. Because the patron is not checking out in a branch library of Org Unit A, the patron is not blocked by Org Unit A's Patron Exceeds Fines penalty.

The Evergreen documentation is silent about differing Group Penalty Thresholds set by systems within a consortium. For consortia with policies that are set at the consortial level, this would not be an issue. For a consortium which allows differing policy limits to be set by each member system, the expected behavior would be for Evergreen to apply the check-out/circulating library's policies (including Group Penalty Threshold) to any patron who attempts to check out within that library system, regardless of the patron's home library or the system that created the billing on the patron account. It is potentially disastrous for a consortium with several org units which share geographic boundaries (and patrons who regularly cross those boundaries) to have Evergreen treat bills on a patron's account as if they did not exist (even if created by another Org Unit). Patrons with large balances could regularly take advantage of self check stations to check out more materials, when they should be automatically blocked by Evergreen.

[Michele Morgan (mmorgan)]

We've recently run across this issue while exploring the use of different thresholds for different systems in our consortium. Our consortium structure is as follows:

CONSORTIUM
 |
  -SYSTEM
    |
     -LIBRARY1
     -LIBRARY2

Only org units at the LIBRARY level have users and items and we would like the ability to set penalty thresholds at the SYSTEM level that apply to LIBRARY1 and LIBRARY2. Without a SYSTEM level threshold set, the CONSORTIUM threshold should apply.

As stated above, we would like the penalties to be set at eacy LIBRARY based on transactions across the entire CONSORTIUM.

[Blake GH (bmagic)]

This bug is very close to the bug/wishlist that I was contemplating submitting. So I'll append here.

A scenario where two library systems allow patrons to use each other's library. Each library has a group penalty threshold for number of items checked out.

Currently, the Evergreen software applies the checkout limit based upon the number of currently checked out from the group penalty defined org_unit.

This little tid bit allows the patron to "game" the system and essentially checkout 25 items from library A and another 31 items from library B. (Where each library have those thresholds defined respectively)

In order to facilitate the two libraries to checkout items across patron's home libraries, we have added the working locations of the opposite branch(es) to each staff account. I know that is a local procedure but how about this as a possible enhancement:

Make Evergreen display and respect all penalties applied at ANY of the branches that the staff account has setup as working locations. The calculation of the penalties don't change but if there is a penalty for a patron within the scope of working branch(es) for the staff account, they should be displayed and respected during checkouts/holds/etc.

Any thoughts on that?

[April Durrence (april-durrence)]

Wanted to update this older bug to say this is still a problem in version 3.3.4. Blake's workaround of adding additional working locations wouldn't work for us, since some of our staff permissions are very intentionally limited to system. So, we would not want staff from another system to have access via working location.

My assumption is that the owning library determines where the Group Penalty Threshold will be applied based on workstation for checkout, etc.

There may also be an impact on collections, since the collection penalty is only visible to the library system where it was applied (based on working location?). Visibility may be a separate bug.

I don't know if a library setting or additional flag would be suitable solution. We would like for all bills and blocks (automated or manual) to be taken into account by the Group Penalty Threshold regardless of whether the billing/blocking org unit matches the org unit applying the Group Penalty Threshold at checkout, etc. Use cases and desired outcome may vary for other libraries/consortia.

[Erica Rohlfs (erohlfs)]

Confirming this behavior still exists in version 3.7.

[Katie Greenleaf Martin (kgmspark)]

Confirming this behavior still exists in version 3.9.