Lazaro Aleman
ECB Publishing, Inc.
The State Attorney Office continues investigating the allegations of unauthorized overspending and other alleged financial misconduct by the Clerk of Court Office.
State Attorney Jack Campbell told ECB Publishing, Inc., on Friday, June 9, that the investigation continues to “be active and ongoing.”
“It has not been dropped,” Campbell said. “It’s still an active criminal investigation.”
The Jefferson County Commission, he said, has been cooperating with his office, and progress is being made.
“We’ll continue to work on it,” Campbell said, adding that this was all he could say at this time without compromising the integrity of the investigation.
He also couldn’t say how much longer it might take to conclude the probe or what the results might be, he said, adding that his office was bound by the facts and evidence of the case.
“It’s still ongoing and the commission has been cooperative, that I can say,” Campbell reiterated.
The Jefferson County Commission referred the case to the State Attorney’s Office and the Florida Department of Law Enforcement (FDLE) for investigation in November of last year, following the findings of a forensic audit of the clerk’s office by auditor Julian Dozier, of Thomas Howell Ferguson CPA.
The gist of the lengthy and detailed audit report was that over the four-year period examined from fiscal year 2019 to
the Board of County Commissioners (BOCC)
The $829,387, Dozier underscored, represented “a best-case scenario.” Possibly, he said, the unauthorized expenditures far exceeded this figure, especially if the review were conducted on a line-by-line basis of the different budgets.
Others of the deficiencies cited in the audit report included the clerk’s use of a county-issued purchasing card for travel expenses, absent “adequate documentation to support the public purpose served;” the clerk’s office issuing numerous checks to various nonprofit organizations for sponsorships and advertising, absent documentation to support how the public was served by the expenditures; and the submittal of a budget that was not completed correctly per the appropriate submission rules and that included expenses for an independent contractor listed as a paid employee with benefits.
Subsequently, the commission referred to the FDLE and State Attorney for investigation a second issue involving the expenditure of $85,000 by the clerk’s office to provide family health insurance coverage to the office’s employees without the commission’s knowledge or its budget being reimbursed the money.
Historically, up to the latter part of fiscal year 2022, when the board changed the policy to have the county pay a portion of employees’ family coverages, the county had paid only for the basic health insurance coverage of employees and had left it to the employees to pay for the family coverage and other extras.
Clerk of Court Kirk Reams has objected strongly to the audit report, calling the findings and allegations reprehensible and politically motivated.
In an open letter published in the newspaper and addressed to the Jefferson County Commission, the State Attorney, FDLE and the citizens of Jefferson County shortly after the audit report’s release, Reams said that the findings that his office had overspent its budget for several years were “unequivocally false and not possible” and that the auditors had “creatively misinterpreted the clerk’s office incorrectly.”
He put blame for the fiasco largely on former Commissioner Betsy Barfield.
“It is disheartening that the board has allowed one uninformed commissioner that lacks the capability to understand the very operations for which she was elected to serve create such a divisive and combative work environment where one did not exist previously and where the county has suffered,” Reams said in the letter. ‘I never thought this brand of dirty politics would infiltrate the place my family has called home for 10 generations, but it is alive and well here.”
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