The Supreme Court of Ohio & The Ohio Judicial System

As part of the ongoing partnership between the Ohio Courts Network and Bureau of Criminal Investigation (BCI), the OCN offers the ability for municipal, county, and common pleas, general division courts to report dispositions to BCI through the OCN. For eligible courts choosing to participate in this process, the disposition data the court is already sending to the OCN in nightly case updates can be automatically transmitted to BCI to fulfill the weekly BCI reporting requirements. Participation in this method of BCI reporting is completely voluntary, and a court’s decision about whether or not to participate in this form of disposition reporting will not affect the court’s continued participation in the OCN.

Please note that using OCN case information to report charge dispositions to BCI is one of several reporting options for any court. Courts may also choose to report electronically directly to BCI (please contact BCI for more information about this method), or dispositions may still be submitted using the paper reporting process.

Courts that choose to participate in the OCN-BCI disposition reporting will no longer need to submit separate disposition reports to BCI once they have completed the implementation process and have been approved and accepted into the process by BCI.

Briefly, here is how the process works:
Once a court is determined to be eligible and has gone through the OCN-BCI reporting onboarding process, the OCN will transmit the court’s dispositions to BCI on a weekly basis. The court will receive a weekly report of any problems with the disposition data, and address any missing or invalid data in the local case management system. Due to current BCI system limitations, some manual reporting to BCI is still required in certain circumstances, such as correcting a previously filed disposition, but the court will manually deal only with “problems” rather than every case.

1. The court must have been reliably sending data to the OCN for at least three months.
   
2. The court must be recording the necessary charge, disposition, and sentencing information in the appropriate fields of the local case management system.
3. The court must be willing to review the reports received back from BCI and correct any issues.

If you believe your court meets these three requirements and would like to begin the participation process, please send an e-mail to ocnhelpdesk@sc.ohio.gov with the following information:

1. The contact information (Name, Title, E-Mail, and Phone Number) for the person in your court who will be the OCN’s primary contact for the setup process – this should be someone who is familiar with your case management system and your current disposition reporting process.
2. Your current method for sending dispositions to BCI (Electronic? Paper?)

Once we receive the information listed above, we will contact the person identified in your e-mail to discuss next steps. We will let them know if there are any issues your court needs to address before you can begin participating, and keep them informed of progress. Until you have received final confirmation that your implementation into the new process is complete, please continue reporting to BCI using your current method – OCN staff will tell you when you should stop submitting your current reports.

Please note – Local ordinance codes do not process correctly into BCI’s electronic reporting system. BCI is working to resolve this issue, but does not currently have a time frame for resolution. While this is being addressed, the OCN will not send any dispositions involving local ordinance codes, but will retain them for later transmission. Once BCI is able to receive the codes electronically, the OCN will begin sending them, including any dispositions which were retained while the issue was being addressed. This will be handled between the OCN and BCI and will not require any additional effort on the court’s part.