By Chris Lisinski

BOSTON — Gov. Charlie Baker on Monday defended his administration’s focus on improving customer service at the Registry of Motor Vehicles while employees there fell short on key public safety responsibilities, a dynamic that investigators highlighted in a lengthy report about the RMV’s failures.

The final report from the audit firm Grant Thornton, which the Baker administration hired to examine the RMV, noted that Department of Transportation staff and aides in Baker’s office were well aware of a software problem that was affecting service centers last year, but did not pay sufficient attention to how a similar issue exacerbated a preexisting backlog of out-of-state driver violations that should have resulted in suspensions.

Asked about that finding Monday, Baker told reporters no one was taken off records duties and ordered instead to focus on service centers.

"The work with respect to the so-called front of the house was work that was important to the public, and I heard about it a lot when I was campaigning and I heard about it a lot since then," Baker said. "I do believe the work that's being done now to clean up the back of the house will dramatically improve the performance of the back of the house."

Grant Thornton's lengthy final report outlined several factors behind the RMV's failure to handle actionable warnings from other states.

The Baker administration tapped the firm this summer after Volodymyr Zhukovskyy of West Springfield, who should have had his commercial driver’s license suspended following an arrest in Connecticut, allegedly killed seven motorcyclists in a crash in New Hampshire.

Auditors found that the breakdown was systemic, with several employees aware that they were not processing paper warnings from other states as they should have been and others allowing electronic notices to build up unattended while awaiting a software fix.

The warnings stretched back decades, Grant Thornton found: Between 1999 and 2002, the RMV’s legal counsel sent a memorandum warning that Massachusetts was not a member of a multistate compact that works to ensure all convictions and suspensions are reported to the driver’s home state.

“Not being a compact member has and would continue to present great risk to the Registry of Motor Vehicles,” wrote Andrew Padellaro, the legal counsel at the time. “Drivers that current Massachusetts law requires to be suspended are not, and Massachusetts inherits many bad drivers and starts them off with clean records.”

Massachusetts remains one of four states that is not a member of the Driver License Compact, according to the report.

Baker called the audit "terrific" in his Monday comments.

"The Grant Thornton report made clear that this problem with the interstate stuff had been going on in Massachusetts on an inconsistent basis and in other states for a very long time," he said. "That's a major fail on everybody's part, and I said so the second I learned about it, which is why we put so much work into cleaning it up once we became aware of it."

Lawmakers on the Joint Committee on Transportation are conducting their own investigation into the RMV, and its chairs, Rep. William Straus, D-Mattapoisett, and Sen. Joseph Boncore, D-Winthrop, said they are likely to convene a second oversight hearing to question additional witnesses.

Two employees have departed the RMV in the wake of the scandal: former Registrar Erin Deveney resigned shortly after the crash, and Thomas Bowes, head of the Merit Rating Board, which failed to process thousands of written out-of-state notices, was fired by an oversight board of the same name in August.

The RMV has suspended licenses of more than 6,300 Massachusetts drivers since July, most of them based on the backlog of old notices that had built up for years. Staff are also checking records of all 5.2 million drivers against a national database into which states enter violation information for any other missed cases.

In a statement after the Baker administration released the Grant Thornton report late last Friday, Straus and Boncore said, "Today's report certainly makes clear that no single person within the Registry caused the widespread and systemic problems in the public safety operations of the Registry. Failures of management and system design occurred at many places and it remains an open question as to whether these kind of extensive problems were unknown outside of the RMV itself."

Baker praised a U.S. Rep. Seth Moulton bill that would require a national system to notify states proactively as any new cases are entered.

"We really ought to be able to get to the point where, once that data comes in, it should be able to ping the state from which the driver's license originated," he said.

State House News Service’s Colin A. Young contributed to this report.