Legislators questioned Carroll County Circuit Clerk Ramona Wilson and Public Defender Robert "Beau" Allen for almost an hour Monday after a review by the Division of Legislative Audit indicated some circuit court fines weren't being paid in a timely manner.
After the meeting, Wilson said about $2.8 million in fines, court costs and restitution are owed to the circuit court in 19th Judicial Circuit-East, which only encompasses Carroll County. But that amount goes back to the 1980s and includes recent court orders that aren't delinquent, she said. Other counties are in a similar situation, with millions of dollars owned to the circuit court, Wilson said.
State Sen. Bryan King, R-Green Forest, described Carroll County as a "broken system" where entities that are supposed to work together seldom communicate. King said the system doesn't work unless there's open communication among circuit judges, circuit clerks, prosecutors, prisons, probation and parole, and law enforcement.
But in Carroll County, the circuit clerk's records are kept on paper ledgers in her office, which makes it difficult for others who need that information, said King.
"Do you see the problem here? You are the central person to keep all the records," King said to Wilson during a meeting Monday at the state Capitol in Little Rock. "You are the source that they have to depend on to find out if [offenders] are delinquent, or paying, or not paying their bill correctly. The problem was you weren't turning these records over to the judge, and when you were turning them over, you missed cases."
During the 18-month period under review, Wilson provided only one report of the status of cases to the circuit judge, according to Legislative Audit.
Wilson said during Monday's meeting that Carroll County Circuit Judge Kent Crow asked only one time for the list to be generated and then didn't ask again after May 20, when Crow lost his bid for re-election to Scott Jackson, a Berryville district judge who got 65.6 percent of the vote.
The Legislative Joint Auditing Committee's subcommittee on counties and municipalities decided to defer action until it can hear from Crow, who said he hadn't had time to review the findings.
"When you're taking a rep snapshot like that, a lot of the time all you're seeing is the tip of the iceberg," Crow said in a telephone interview after the meeting.
King, who is chairman of the committee, said it doesn't normally meet during legislative sessions, and the next session begins Jan. 12.
The Legislative Audit review included 370 criminal cases filed between Jan. 1, 2013, and June 30, 2014. The audit found 53 cases where payment hadn't been made for three months, 31 cases for which payments were delinquent and the circuit judge not notified, and 16 cases omitted from the list the circuit clerk provided to the circuit judge for cases with balances due as of Feb. 28.
Auditors also found:
• 22 cases for which installment payment fees were not charged to the defendant's time payment card for all months that were delinquent.
• 12 cases for which additional hours of work by the public defender were not posted to the time payment card after being filed in the defendant's case.
• six cases for which the time payment card could not be located.
• three cases for which the defendant was charged a $10 monthly installment payment fee although incarcerated.
• five cases in which public defender fees assessed by the court were waived by the public defender.
• 11 defendants who were discharged from probation although they had outstanding balances for fines, costs and restitution. Of those 11, one defendant subsequently paid the account balance. The remaining 10 owed a total of $17,219 as of Nov. 24, according to the letter.
According to the audit report, there was no administrative order from the judge allowing the public defender's office to waive fees. Allen said he had spoken to Judge Crow in his chamber and been given the OK to waive the fees in those cases mentioned in the audit, but had failed to include a notation of the judge's consent in his waiver.
"I should have said with the authority of the court I waive these fees or have these fees waived. And technically, they're probably not even waived because I don't have a judge's signature," he said.
Allen said he was trying to act quickly to prevent lawsuits for issues in the fines system.
"People were being arrested before fines were even owed. There were fees calculated while people were in prison in conflict with state statutes," Allen said. "There were a lot of things going on. I had a probation officer calling me saying, 'Hey these people are being arrested. They don't owe fines.'"
Crow said he hadn't had a chance to review the cases Allen was referring to.
King said he wanted confirmation that there was an Administrative Rule under the Supreme Court that requires written judicial approval to waive fees or fines.
Collection of fines, court costs and restitution has been an issue in Carroll County for years.
Crow implemented a plan to collect the fees in 2012 after Arkansas Chief Justice Jim Hannah met with judges from across the state and encouraged them to begin collecting outstanding debt.
The plan was part of a legislative mandate that increased fines and court fees and pushed collections to bolster the state's Administration of Justice fund, which pays for public defenders, prosecuting attorneys, interpreters, court recorders and other essential personnel. The demands on the fund have increased and the collections have decreased in recent years putting a pinch on the agencies that provide that court staff.
Crow said he got little cooperation from Wilson.
"So the Supreme Court wants circuit courts to try to collect," Crow said Monday. "That's what I've been trying to do. All I've been met with is resistance in every corner in Carroll County, mostly from the circuit clerk."
Wilson, a Democrat, said the issue had become political. Crow said, "I don't know why it would be."
Keith Caviness, a staff attorney for the Arkansas Administrative Office of the Courts, said the amount owed to the Circuit Court in Carroll County probably isn't any more than in other counties, but no statewide records are kept on outstanding circuit court fines and fees.
But King and other legislators said a big part of the problem is Wilson's unwillingness to automate the system.
Carroll County began using the state-provided Contexte program a little more than a year ago to put its court cases online. Caviness said that program also includes a financial tracking component that many circuit clerk's use to track fines and fees and that can generate automatic reports for delinquencies.
Wilson said it was recommended during training "that we wait until we had gotten comfortable with the new program of doing this ... and ease out into that [financial] program."
King said the audit had found 16 cases missing from the 370 in the audit because of what Wilson said was human error. He said the error seemed unnecessary.
"The reality is that in this system you are the gatekeeper and you weren't notifying the prosecutor and the judge," he said.
Wilson responded, "It was sporadic, I will say that."
A Section on 12/16/2014