An audit of the Baltimore sheriff's office has uncovered slipshod accounting practices, inadequate safeguards against theft and an unreliable fee collection system that has cost the city hundreds of thousands of dollars.
City Auditor Allan L. Reynolds, who reviewed 18 months of financial transactions by the 137-member office, also discovered that $42,000 in receipts was missing. He has asked the city state's attorney's office to investigate.
Mr. Reynolds' audit, a copy of which was obtained by The Sun, found widespread deficiencies in the most basic accounting of the $2 million in criminal fines, civil fees and other court revenue. The sheriff's office did not even compare its daily receipts with deposits for the period that ended Dec. 31, 1993, the audit report says.
The problems with handling cash were so severe, Mr. Reynolds concluded, that "funds could be misappropriated with very little chance of detection. There is an urgent need to strengthen controls over cash handling procedures."
During a 30-month period, employees never collected court fees worth $500,000 to the city.
Copies of the Feb. 9 report have been sent to the city's Board of Estimates for review. The financial panel is expected to discuss the findings at its weekly meeting tomorrow.
Shirley Williams, Baltimore's acting comptroller, said yesterday that she is "concerned that procedures were never in place to collect the money."
"I think the audit points out that there isn't really a checks-and-balance system," she said. "We don't have any system at all."
Mr. Reynolds began the audit after officials from the city's law library questioned why fees collected on their behalf by the sheriff had declined. The city auditor noted that a routine review of the agency was overdue and began to look at its day-to-day operations a year ago.
In a letter to Administrative Judge Joseph H. H. Kaplan of the Baltimore Circuit Court, Mr. Reynolds termed the sheriff's failures to collect some fees "inexcusable." But he also noted the difficulty in collecting small fees and asked the judges to look into forcing defendants to pay on their day in court.
Sheriff John W. Anderson could not be reached for comment last night. His chief deputy, David DeAngelis, said the sheriff had requested an audit more than three years ago because the previous sheriff, Shelton J. Stewart, had resigned from the office under the cloud of an obstruction of justice conviction. Sheriff Anderson was appointed to the post in 1989 and was unopposed for election last year.
Sheriff Anderson hoped an audit would persuade city officials to pay for equipment to ensure better bookkeeping, the chief deputy said.
Chief Deputy DeAngelis embraced a finding by the audit that errors in accounting civil fines could be reduced if a computerized system was used for criminal funds instead of manual bookkeeping.
Chief Deputy DeAngelis also questioned whether the office could ever collect as much as the auditors said because some costs are assessed against convicted criminals.
"It's hard money to get," he said. "Some of these people are murderers. The last thing they worry about is $70 in court costs."
The sheriff's office already has instituted some new practices to comply with the report's recommendations, such as double-checking each day's receipts against the deposits, he said.
Among the findings and recommendations in the nine-page report:
* The sheriff's office fails to properly record and deposit its average
daily collections of 30 to 40 receipts worth $5,300, of which 25 percent is in cash.
In one example, Mr. Reynolds' auditing staff found a $10,145 discrepancy on Sept. 23, 1993, between the cash register tape and the office's bank deposit slip. Some deposits were not made until the next day, or even as late as the following week.
As one solution, Mr. Reynolds proposed stationing a cashier at Baltimore's downtown courthouse and turning over the collections to the Finance Department, which has an office nearby.
* The office took as much as a month to send money it collected to the city treasury, costing the government an unspecified amount in interest. The delays also may have masked discrepancies between receipts and deposits, such as the missing $42,000.
Haven H. Kodeck, head of the economic crimes unit of the state's attorney's office, said the criminal investigation is in "the beginning stage."
* The sheriff was not aggressive in collecting court-ordered fines, fees and forfeitures. Mr. Reynolds found the office failed to keep complete records and did not know whether all of the fees had been collected.