Auditor confirms problems in former Carbon clerk's office

The Pennsylvania auditor general has confirmed the commissioners’ concerns about the clerk of courts operations over the past several years through a newly released audit.

The audit, released by Auditor General Eugene DePasquale on Dec. 21, states that there was inadequate assessment of fines, costs, fees and surcharges by the clerk of courts office between Jan. 1, 2013, and Dec. 31, 2016.

“Everything we have been saying at this table and everything Fran (Heaney) has been doing to try and catch up is now verified by the auditor general,” Commissioner William O’Gurek said. “They found that basically they weren’t doing their work over there. They weren’t assessing cost, fines and restitution.”

The audit report said there were deficiencies, including fines, costs, fees and surcharges not being assessed in a timely manner; inadequate internal controls over receipts of the bail account; inadequate internal controls over the fines and cost account and fees not being assessed properly.

Assessments

In the auditor general’s findings of the accounting records that, “as of Dec. 31, 2016, there was $103,130.55 being held in escrow for payments on cases that had not yet been assessed fines, costs, fees and surcharges after sentencing.”

The report shows that former Clerk of Courts William McGinley was “solely responsible for assessing the fines, costs, fees and surcharges on all cases” and that office staff was not trained or permitted to do these assessments.

Because of this, the state could not determine just how much was due and not remitted to the state or appropriate parties.

The director of bureau of collections, on behalf of the then acting Clerk of Courts Julie Harris, who oversaw the office after McGinley retired until Francine Heaney was sworn in, responded that McGinley not permitting other staff in the office to do assessments “introduced human error and a lack of supervision and correction to an already complicated process.”

Bail account

The auditor general had 85 receipts from the bail account for this time period that he looked at, and of those, 48 were not deposited on the same day the fees were collected, sometimes waiting between two and 396 days before the fees were deposited.

In addition, the report says auditors found six receipts totaling $1,250 that had not been deposited.

The director of the bureau of collections, on behalf of Harris, said, “this shows a complete lack of internal controls in reference to regular depositing of bail money and has resulted in mishandling of money and an investigation into missing money.”

The report says McGinley had “full control” over these processes and had been warned by the county controller, but had not made any attempts to correct the issue.

Fines and Cost account

The auditor general also found that there were 122 outstanding checks totaling $10,588.84, dated between Sept. 5, 2014, and June 10, 2016, that were still outstanding on Dec. 31, 2016. There were 25 instances in which cash between $535 and $3,743.67 was held by the clerk overnight instead of being deposited on the same day it was received.

The director of the bureau of collections said the task of reviewing outstanding checks was under the sole supervision of McGinley and that the county controller and director of bureau of collections recommended creating an escheat process, but McGinley felt they should not be.