When the Merit Rating Board first entered the spotlight, the all but defunct governing body made headlines. Reconvening in August, it fired a transportation official who admitted failing to address an enormous backlog.

It was the first record of activity for a board that lay dormant for the better part of a decade. Before the Aug. 20 meeting, the Merit Rating Board had one scheduled meeting in the past eight years.

No transcript or other record exists detailing what the members discussed. In other words, there’s no record to verify the meeting happened.

The agency’s failure to process out-of-state driving violations came to light after the June 21 crash. The driver charged in the crash, Volodymyr Zhukovskyy of West Springfield, had an active commercial license despite a May drunken driving arrest where he refused a breathalyzer test.

The crash revealed that Zhukovskyy’s motor vehicle violations, and thousands of others, sat unprocessed in bins within the RMV’s Quincy office for years.

Erin Deveney, the registrar at the time, stepped down, and Tesler was appointed acting registrar. Thousands of people have seen their licenses suspended in recent months, when transportation employees finally combed through the out-of-state notices.

These problems fell under the purview of the three-member board, which had one meeting between 2011 and spring 2019. The agenda for the Oct. 16, 2015 meeting lists plans to discuss a computer modernization project, apparently referring to the computer system shift in March 2018 with which RMV officials struggled.

At the time of the New Hampshire crash, the Merit Rating Board included Deveney, Division of Insurance Commissioner Gary Anderson and Assistant Attorney General Glenn Kaplan.

Efforts to reach Deveney were unsuccessful. The Attorney General’s office referred questions about the Merit Rating Board to MassDOT.

When asked when the Merit Rating Board last held regular meetings, a MassDOT spokesman could not give an exact answer, referring instead to one of Acting Registrar Jamey Tesler’s interim reports. Those reports were issued in the wake of the New Hampshire motorcycle crash that killed seven people.

The report states the registrar, the Division of Insurance Commissioner and the Attorney General, or designees for those officials, are supposed to oversee the RMV’s Merit Rating Board unit, through a board by the same name.

“However, it does not appear that the MRB oversight board has met in a public fashion, with the meetings posted and minutes kept, for some time,” the report stated.

The MassDOT spokesman did not offer more information, except to note that the board has met twice in 2019 and is planning bi-weekly meetings on Wednesdays going forward.

Thomas Bowes, the ousted transportation official who oversaw the Merit Rating Board unit, said he directed his employees to stop combing through the original backlog to deal with new issues that came up during that transition.

The agenda also listed plans to discuss an eCitation Project and the retirement of the MRB director that preceded Bowes.

No meeting minutes detailing the 2015 meeting exist, so there’s no way to know what was discussed or whether the meeting actually happened.

Glenn Kaplan, the Attorney General office’s representative, tried to set up meetings for the board, emails show.

In March 2015, Kaplan emailed Merit Rating Board Director MaryAnn Mulhall stating he had been reappointed to the three-member board and wanted to know when the next meeting would be.

Mulhall responded saying she would schedule a meeting in the next month or two.

The next meeting, and apparently the only one, was scheduled for Oct. 16.

In a Feb. 13, 2018, email about meeting with Deveney, Kaplan asked whether the meeting was a private one or an official Merit Rating Board he was trying to schedule.

“I just want to make sure we are on the same page,” he wrote. “I have been working to get a meeting on the books for the Merit Rating Board. That requires the Register, or her designee, the Commissioner of Insurance, or his designee, and me (the three of us are Board members for the Merit Rating Board) … is this the meeting you are setting up?”

The Grant Thornton audit reviewing the RMV practices leading up to the fatal crash noted that the Merit Rating Board should be regularly meeting, as does a report from the Pioneer Institute released Thursday.

The Pioneer Institute report notes that no minutes have been approved of the Aug. 20 and Sept. 25 meetings, nor do any agendas or minutes of meetings prior to 2019 appear on the board’s website. The report recommended posting agendas and minutes prior to 2019 or at least identifying when those meetings happened “at least while corrective efforts are actively underway and public interest is great.”

When asked by MassLive about the most recent minutes, a MassDOT spokesman said the minutes would be approved at Thursday’s meeting.

In the months since the backlog was discovered, the RMV has suspended at least 4,443 licenses as a review of the unprocessed mail-in violation notices from other states.